Meals Moods Moments Memories

I’m sitting at my desk, which is now in my bedroom. I love that there is space for a desk in here: perfect for an intrepid (read wannabe) writer: when I cannot sleep I sit here and write, a cup of tea at my elbow…

Tomorrow night I will have a first dinner party here, in the new place. I smiled at myself earlier this week: I had been obsessing about what to cook for an ex husband and his girlfriend, and a couple who have been friends of my boyfriend’s for a very long time. I hate to confess that I really want to impress!! So, yes, I talked it through with my therapist!

And, now that I have explored the unconscious stuff around that, I am able to start cooking. I have started cooking actually: I work until after midday tomorrow, and when you hear the menu, you will understand why there is an enamelled cast iron pot with soffrito slowly caramelising in my kitchen as I write here…a whole day before my guests arrive.

The menu was inspired by a gift, an offering almost, of a shoulder of Springbok, hunted by this ex husband, which he gave me, vacuum packed and frozen, from his freezer a couple of weeks ago.

So, to start we will have bruscetta: toasted, sliced ciabbata rubbed with garlic, with heaps of oven roasted baby romano tomatoes(which are also slowly being cooked in the oven as we speak), and thinly sliced coppa….The coppa( bought on my behalf by my the same ex who will be here) directly from where it is made by Roberto of Fama: he has been buying that and chourico there for years…

Then, a venison ragu with papardelle, followed by pannacotta with fresh berries: blueberries, blackberries and raspberries steeped in marsala, and maybe a touch of cinnamon, and honey(the way I had it recenly, or almost the way a good friend made it: he added aloe juice)….I will make the papardelle myself: tomorrow afternoon after I have put the pannacotta into the fridge to set. I will have just enough time to do that…

I hope it does not rain: I will set a long table out in the pretty courtyard at the back, the french doors of my kitchen flung open….a tablecloth which was a gift from my beloved mom draped over it, sparkling wine cooling in a silver (plated, sigh!!) bucket, glasses catching the flicker of candles…. Flowers, probably roses….I think at least half the pleasure I derive from cooking for people is from the planning… and the picture I create in my head of what I’d like to present them with…

I have not cooked venison in years: I grew up with a hunting-fishing kind of father (and therefore brothers) and a mother who did not mind getting up to her elbows in processing game carcasses…I remember my father coming back from hunting trips, smelling of wood smoke and two or three days stubble on his face and cigarettes and faint sweet alcohol (brandy and coke) on his breath as he kissed me hello, a carcass over his shoulders, literally flinging it, skinned and gutted onto the kitchen table. My mom would process the meat: biltong cuts steeped in a special brine and spice mix in an enamel bath which used to be a baby’s bath(I even probably was bathed in it before it took on another incarnation), and then mincing the other meat for dried wors, her mincer clamped to the same table… and the next day that smell which I cannot to this day tolerate would permeate house: of the last bits of flesh being cooked from the bones to make venison pie with.

So, when I add the meat to the pot to brown soon, and then the red wine (a very drinkable shiraz which no doubt I shall have the leftovers of) and fresh sage leaves and surprisingly: salted anchovy fillets, to slowly transform a chunk of raw, bloody wild meat to a fragrant, meltingly meaty and hopefully impressive ragu, I shall be thinking of my father, and my mother, and a childhood home, and an ex husband who after ten years is suddenly, surprisingly back in my life: an offer of fond friendship and many evenings of food and wine with the woman whom he loves now, and me and the man I love now…

I am sitting in my new lounge, a second cup of tea cooling on the strangely named “coffee table”: I’m suddenly now wondering where that convention began…why not a tea table? At least there’s some poetry to that!

I have been in the new house for just over a week: the move went incredibly smoothly, with the removals man at my gate at 7h45 on last Friday morning, 15 minutes early finding me breathless on a stepladder unhooking the last curtain, my third cup of tea on this same coffee table, swept clear of books, and other objects already carefully packed away in a small box labled Elli bowls: I have a friend who is a porcelainist and over years I have acquired a collection of exquisite bowls and objects…she lives in Germany for half the year and the other half is here with her partner of over 25 years who is an architecht and when she is not here, lives quite reclusively in a beautiful minimalistic house on Auckland Park ridge. They are favourite dinner guests…

I have had some dinners for two here since my boyfriend duly brought supper over on my first night here a week ago. Last night I served us a really nice ragu: cooked like Marcella Hazan suggested for about 4 hours on the lowest setting on the smallest hob of my already beloved gas stove. And I made fresh fettucini! I took out my pasta machine for the first time in about two years: at the previous place my kitchen counter was designed in a way where there was not enough grip for the clamp, so I packed it away… I spent an afternoon like an Italian mama: in my kitchen, first making the pasta dough(also a la Marcella though once you know the ratio of egg to flour there’s no great mystery) and resting it in the fridge, while I chopped onion and celery and onion for the soffrito…(or is it sofrito?)

It was such a thrill to see the strands of fettucini swell out from the roller as I turned the handle: that smell of fresh egg and flour reminding me somehow of the fragrance of freshly laundered linen…

I had a long bath before my lover arrived, as I do almost ritualistically when I cook for us, and washed my hair, as I do, but when he kissed me later he told me that my hair was redolent of ragu: perfume and pasta sauce… and by that time wine on my breath.

I will have a first Sunday lunch here later: for my dad and his girlfriend and my lover and the three sons we have between us. I am doing a leg of lamb roast, with morroccan flavours and a huge bowl of couscous with mint and coriander and feta and dates and soft dried apricots and orange zest and pistachio… and roasted butternut…..maybe figs and halva ice cream for pudding: I am not sure yet…yum!

I am looking over to the dinner table, in a little dining room space just off the lounge, with a bay window, where we will all be sitting around in a couple of hours. At the moment a pewter vase with stargazer lilies which have not opened is standing in the middle of the table: the stems with their demure buds reaching almost the width of the table. Soon they will start opening and then there will be no trace of shyness: glorious, bigger than my hand, petals curled back to reveal their dripping and dazzling innermost parts displayed with an almost insolent self congratulatory glory…. And then that particular fragrance will blend and mix with all the cooking smells of all the meals which I will cook in the next week…one dinner for a lover, one Wednesday meal for hungry sons, and one dinner party next Saturday.

I think I’m home!