Growing Things
Something more from Nigel Slater – sorry, you will have to indulge me this topic. In this clip from Guardian Online, he promotes his new book Tender: A Cook and his Vegetable Patch.
Funny hearing someone speak after you’ve read them for years. He seems so earnest about growing your own that I half expected him to cry. Not surprising, I suppose, since the man can make eating a frugal bowl of lentils sound romantic and not something to be done out of necessity.
View; Chestnuts
Surprises from the upstairs bus window this morning: conkers ripening on chestnuts; leaves withering; pears dripping from a tree.
Speaking of chestnuts, did you know there is a World Conker Championship? You don’t, however, have to travel all the way to Northamptonshire to play the game: any park with a horse chestnut tree nearby will do. Find a fallen conker, make a hole in it, then thread a shoelace or length of string through it. The objective is to hit your partner’s conker with your own until one of them breaks. The hardest conker wins.
Usefully, you can cheat at the game by using a conker you gathered the previous year and allowed to harden. Quite.
Horse chestnuts, incidentally, are not the trees from which those delicious roasted chestnuts originate, and which Bonne Maman sells as beurre de marron (chestnut butter). Those are more likely to be the fruit of sweet chestnut trees.
My favourite celeb chef, Nigel Slater, had this to say about chestnut butter in the Guardian recently:
My favourite is to use it in a dessert with meringues. Crumble the meringues into a bowl, fold in a little whipped cream, squeeze the chestnut purée from the tube over the top, then spoon over some melted dark chocolate.
Yum.
I don’t expect horse chestnuts taste of anything much, really. Better just to beat the hell out of them on a playing field.
Bank Holiday
To Hampstead Heath again. Swimming in the ponds. Afternoon sun. A warm glow in the evening. Perfect.
(Promise that the next post will have nothing to do with Hampstead Heath.)
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