Sometimes Love Just Isn’t EnoUgh

At the end of next month Jan and I will celebrate our Ruby Wedding anniversary. Time to draft a bit of speechifying methinks.

“We were much younger then and, if we are honest, not utterly sure of the outcome, but we signed a contract to bind us.

It’s actually more than forty years now since we started our relationship. Right from those early days we explored many ways to make things work. Often we selfishly started with what was best for us as an individual. But we were big enough to realise that we had chosen our partner because we rather liked them and that helped us to take their hopes, wants and needs and mix them in with ours.

Once we had made that small but significant step, we started to really grow together. Protecting your own interests while desperate not to hurt someone you think of as so very special is a struggle. Occasionally we more or less gave in to the other’s demands but so much more often we found a way to work things through with positives for both of us.

Definitely a struggle… but a struggle that revealed countless things about each other which we wanted to hold fast to and build on. A struggle which strengthened us rather than pushed us apart. We became better together than we ever were on our own.

There is love, of course - love in all its different expressions. But there is now so much more. The intricate and complicated nature of our partnership makes it at turns vibrant and frustrating… but always gloriously enriching.

There… I could just as easily be describing our marriage instead of the British union with Europe, couldn’t I?

Our marriage will endure and grow. After all those same wonderful connections made over decades it is so sad that a nation has decided to give up its previously rewarding struggle and discard its partner.

Jan and I intend to live and work in peace with the decision made on the 23 June.

Our marriage remains our wonderful and enduring achievement. We will never let it go. We will never let each other go.

Some things were not meant to be.

Jan and I were always meant to be.”

While fearing the worst, I still hope I can utter different words to our invited guests in six weeks time. If not, we will still have something magnificent to celebrate and Jan and I will be together to share whatever comes.

Sometimes love is not enough. Sometimes… let’s be honest, almost always, we need to draw on much more complicated connections. Connections which have been forged over a time long enough to give truly serious thought to breaking those precious links.

“We are far more united and have far more in common with each other than that which divides us.”

(Jo Cox, British politician)

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#nationalfishandchipday - 3rd June 2016

The dish which was once considered so important that Winston Churchill wouldn't ration it during WWII due to fears of triggering widespread discontent is given a day of devotion today. 

Great, glorious British Fish & Chips from a great and glorious fish and chip shop anywhere in Britain can be a heavy challenge to the digestive system. At least, it has become so for my wife and me in later years. We still can't resist the occasional trip for traditional punishment, whether it be from a takeaway or at a Formica-topped seaside restaurant table.

What follows is now our much more regular (at least once a fortnight) way of enjoying a classic. I will find it very hard to forgive you if you don't source your fish from the best supplier possible. Forget the supermarkets and seek out a proper wet fish shop, a good fish van or drive to Grimsby Fish Docks like I did to buy haddock for our meal tonight.

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Fish

Haddock fillets. Cut a sheet of baking paper large enough to go under and fold over the pieces of fish. Season with salt and pepper and drizzle with almost no oil whatsoever. Place on an oven tray with the paper covering and bake at 200°C for about ten minutes... until the flesh has not completely surrendered and is flaky and still looks slightly 'glassy'. 

The lack of batter here might put off a few but if you've taken the trouble to find good ingredients why mess about with them? With this approach, you get rid of all that messy deep fat frying too. 

Chips

Wedges, actually. King Edwards for preference. Cut each potato into six or eight 'Toblerone' shaped pretenders according to their size. Don't bother peeling the skins. Boil in salted water for fifteen minutes and drain. When relatively dry, tip into an oven tray which has a light drizzle of oil on the base and has been heated for ten minutes in that 200°C oven. I added thyme sprigs and crushed cloves of garlic. If you aren't prepared to follow me to the letter, just go with your own ideas... cayenne, rosemary and lemon rinds have all made an appearance here over time. Back in the oven for fifty minutes before serving.

The 'chips' are cooking first, of course. I'm letting you make notes on a piece of scrap paper with strict instructions on timing so that all comes tidily together for plating.

Tomatoes

Halve a punnet of cherry tomatoes and put them flat-side down on a tray with a glug of olive oil. Once all are positioned, slide them around and turn onto their curved side. Sprinkle the glistening tops with torn basil and grind more salt and pepper on them than you think is dignified. Prepare these and put in the oven after the fish has gone in. They will get about forty minutes and hopefully caramelise a little in places. Keep an eye on them and take out and rest somewhere warm if they are getting too well done.

Peas

Buy a 300g can of Harry Ramsden's Mushy Peas for each couple you are feeding. Heat in a microwave. Sometimes cooking is a doddle, eh.

When all is ready (you did make those notes on timings, didn't you?) serve on pre-heated plates and make ketchup and HP brown sauce available. You might want to add vinegar or find a recipe for tartare sauce. I was so excited about having a special day devoted to one of my favourite meals that those last two were left out.

Don't wait until the third of June next year. This is a great way to enjoy iconic ingredients which really aren't so very difficult to cook at home.

 

Feast of the Annunciation/Good Friday - March 25th 2016

A lousy picture of a wonderful bird. This robin occupied a tree next door for two and a half hours while I tidied around our garden, cut the grass and put up a bit of the outside furniture.

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For those entire two and a half hours the redbreast sang its heart out. I realise that it was very likely not trying to attract me, but a mate.

Flitting away for about forty minutes, its return was followed by a further hour of singing.

Glorious!

I know I'm a heathen, but I'm guessing that I found as much delight in this as any Christian fellow contemplating the dually portentous events of the Annunciation and the Passion today.

The Barcelona Pavilion - Update

Less than a day after publishing my appreciation of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion I decided to follow the Twitter feed of The Fundació Mies van der Rohe.

Right away came the announcement of the latest installation (or intervention) to which the pavilion would play host.

Here is a link to details of the competition which Spanish architect Luis Martínez Santa-María has just won.

And here is how the ‘Fear of Columns’ jury explained their decision:

“The jury particularly valued the compelling nature of the winning entry, which encapsulates the vertical component of the pre-existing columns in contrast to the horizontality of the Pavilion. The project denotes an absolutely contemporary approach marked by awareness of the environment and the need to permanently reutilise resources. At the same time, it expresses the provisional character of an ephemeral installation temporarily affixed to the Pavilion.”

These are a couple of English websites which tell the story. Both are on-line publishers of magazines on design and architecture… bustler and dezeen.

There you have it. If you are in Barcelona for any of the five months after the 1st of June you will not only see the glorious work of Mies van der Rohe but also decide how much the latest addition complements his design.

We will not return so soon. But do watch out in ten years’ time when I post photographs of this building in its completed state!

Mies van der Rohe - The Barcelona Pavilion

Please link to this update after reading here.

In 1972 I had some skills in calligraphy and drawing, having used them for Art ‘A’ level. I had been seduced by the world of medieval art and International Gothic. Thames and Hudson were publishing sumptuous reproductions of illuminated manuscripts and I was powerless to resist them. Embarking on a degree in art history meant that practical skills were all but discarded. This was never a happy state of affairs as I trundled through and came out with a third-rate degree. Meeting my first-rate wife at the same time in Norwich would generate a much more meaningful certificate and will always count as huge compensation.

UEA’s School of Fine Arts and Music (FAM) was peopled by a stellar cast of academics at that time. I failed to take full advantage of their wisdom and enthusiasm but still remember them as terrifically accomplished and positive examples of the teaching profession.

Eric Fernie introduced me to the glories of Norwich cathedral on days when I shivered less with the cold than with the delight of revelatory intimate detail about the building.

Nigel Morgan appears since to have shifted his focus forward a few centuries... right up to the fifteenth. Back then he was all Carolingian, Insular and uncial... and so enthused it almost hurt.

John Onians began lecturing a year before my arrival. It was his sad task to write this obituary of the wonderfully forbidding but, ultimately, very approachable Dean, Andrew Martindale.

It was Stefan Muthesius who would drag me kicking and screaming back into the twentieth century as he prepared a group of us for a subsidiary paper on Modernist Architecture. The contrast between its "less is more" approach and the visual minutiae of High Gothic is stark. But I was prepared. Walking daily in the 'Brutalist' UEA campus of Eaton Park had prepared me. I was already in a casual relationship with slabs of reinforced concrete. There, in seminars, alongside Gropius, Le Corbusier, Lloyd Wright and... well, others fade into comparative insignificance... was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. We studied his early visionary sketches for mostly unfulfilled designs and soaked up the continent-spanning works of his realised genius. And we looked at photographs of his iconic German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona.

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We necessarily looked at photographs. Black and white photographs. The pavilion was commissioned months before inauguration of the Expo, completed on time and disassembled at its end in 1930 before a year had passed.

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I first visited Barcelona in 1973 as a hitch-hiking student. I returned in 1996 with my wife and two sons on a day trip over the French border to visit Park Guell and have lunch at McDonald's. This March, a further twenty years later, I was able to look at, walk around and feel the impact of the architect’s genius. Since the late 1950s it was proposed to reconstruct the pavilion. Finally, in 1986, it rose again in the original location.

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I was totally unprepared for the impression the building would make upon me. I have since filled in certain details of construction and read more analysis by art historians but the overpowering memory is that of wonder at the intensity of feeling created by such restrained and simple elements. I say restrained, but, of course, the polished marble is sumptuously rich. Yet, for me it does not shout out its luxury and decadence. Instead, it joins with other elements to calmly guide you round the space like a reassuring, concerned, loving parent might. You feel, at once, cocooned and free. All weighty things achieve a confounding lightness. The whole concept was intended to demonstrate the spirit of the Weimar Republic and "the clarity, simplicity and honesty" of Germany at that time. Modern architectural language expresses itself all around us now but I cannot remember being previously aware of it speaking to me so succinctly and with such assurance and conviction. It was poignant that most of the other visitors were groups of students experiencing Mies van der Rohe's design first-hand. They were discovering the building at the same age as I did but without that tantalising wait of forty-five years before actually seeing it. 

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Finding this picture of dignitaries at the pavilion's opening presented a lovely contradiction to me. These are people who sport the trappings of formal fashion. Yes, they have the restraints of convention and expectation, but I can't see them as anything other than helpless anachronisms in contrast with the space which has been designed for them. They seem rooted in time while, all around them, the ideas of one inspired person float and fly towards us eighty-seven years in the future. 

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I have interspersed pictorial ‘slices’ of my experience in this post. There is an album of selected pictures from my visit here. You can, of course find multiple images and sources to investigate further on the internet and in libraries.

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Mine was a rather strange and special experience. My wife and I still enjoy so very much together. But for once I walked up the few steps onto the elevated marble slab floor on my own. Jan can be seen in one of my photographs, reflected in the building’s glass sheets. Footsore after a trek around Monjuic, the Miro Foundation and the Olympic park and stadium, she sat all the while on a bench about a hundred metres away. I waved once but never beckoned her over to share what I was basking in. This 'trial separation' actually elevated the whole thing for me. It was thrilling to be somewhere magical and to have the chance to enjoy it alone, without distraction. After nearly forty years of marriage, I was almost at ease with my selfishness. And, if the mild pangs of guilt do fail to subside, I have half-baked plans to return in another twenty years to walk together up those steps on our Diamond wedding anniversary.

Once again, it will be very difficult to prevent Professor Muthesius from being there. I'll set aside room for the rest of my old tutors on that distant bench vacated by my wife... or they might all just sit quietly on Barcelona chairs.

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Marmalade 2016 - Preserving The Warm Orange Glow

My silly notion that we might have enough of 2015's marmalade to keep us going was... well, just silly. A couple of days' effort, with lots more juicing, chopping, boiling and a little wiping of steamy windows, has produced the supply shown above. What follows is a final round-up of my 2016 marmalade activity. 

Last week I made precious jars of the marmalade master at Melrose & Morgan, Nick Selby's, lovely recipe... Plus that rhubarb and rose teabag jelly thing, of course. That just left a pile of Seville oranges to be dealt with. For these I deserted any books I have and internetted it for a while, coming up with this 'ultimate recipe'. I'm not sure about the tag. As long as I'm cooking, I'll enjoy the likelihood that 'ultimate' is out of reach, just around the corner... It helps in the struggle for perfection!

The immediate difference to all previously made marmalade recipes was the cooking of whole oranges. Not that I hadn't done it before in another situation. Thoughts turned straight to Claudia Roden and, more specifically, to her glorious 'Middle Eastern Orange Cake' in Diana Henry's 'Crazy Water Pickled Lemons'. The recipe lured me into buying my first Diana Henry cook book... all others were quickly sourced or pre-ordered when announced.

Back to Seville. The cooked oranges were a treat. The peel was blissfully easy to chop. The inner pulp scraped out readily and created a lovely pectin bag. This instigated a spot of silliness on my Facebook page. I might as well post it here in a last-ditch attempt to get it out of my system:

Setting point was reached quicker than ever before and in no time jars were filled and lids tightened. There were enough oranges to double the recipe so I decided to have another 'Marmalade muckabout' with the last batch. All was done as per the recipe but I introduced two flavours of my choice to the remaining juice and cut peel. Split into two smaller pans, I added powdered liquorice to one and crushed cardamom pods  to the other. To give you an idea, I had 560g of juice and sugar for each before adding the peel. Tasting was dangerous as I was dipping into very hot liquid. Drips onto cold saucers told me when both were fine. The liquorice was just right, and remains so. It needs to be used sparingly, though... unless you are a full-strength addict. I used a rounded teaspoonful. The cardamom left its traces very subtly. I would use more than the dozen pods next time or, perhaps, just the seeds from as many. I set both types in mini jars as potential gifts. They are cloudy compared to the clarity of the 'straight' batch.  

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The maslin pan is away now, waiting for summer fruits. The members of that opening photograph parade have all been safely stored. I continue to identify them using a roll of self-adhesive supermarket labels. The designs vary according to my whim. I'll keep adding copies of them to the LABELS album under the PHOTOS menu. 

With coloured pens out, I relaxed into a couple of hours' artwork. Nothing too developed but at least no sticky post-marmalade marks.

There has been inspiration from various quarters during this 'Orange Period'. Let's acknowledge some of them here:

Diana Henry... we meet quietly every Sunday in 'Stella' magazine and she gives me advice, inspiration and renewed pleasure whenever I take her down from a bookshelf.

Melrose & Morgan... a modern grocery business with class, underpinned by lovely old-fashioned attitudes and a rather splendid book.

 Anna Koska... her lovely art inspired me to get out my fine liner pens and try to capture some fruity goodness on paper. Follow her @Twitter feed for work in progress.

Claudia Roden... just take your pick from a woman whose Wikipedia page says bugger all about her wonderful wide-ranging achievements. 

Sous Chef... the home smoker, a Christmas present from my brother and his wife, came from here - as did that refined Italian liquorice. They have much that is tempting for every cook.

Marmalade muckabout

It's just a few days after my last marmalade themed post. Since then I've sliced, chopped, squeezed and boiled to replenish stocks of my favourite complex three fruit marmalade. That remaining bowl of Seville oranges will be used for more jars of 'straight' tangy variety. 

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'Good Morning' Breakfast Marmalade complete. Next destination... Seville! 

The yield is a couple of jars down from normal. That was deliberate. At least, it was after I'd had my little thought. As I started the second batch I decided to take out two ladlesworth of sugary juice before the softened peel was added back.

We are at the start of a glorious few weeks when forced rhubarb is making its appearance. Restaurants are grabbing supplies (tenderly, I hope) and adding this seasonal ingredient to their menus. Many will be offering a dessert with a blood orange sorbet or jelly. A panna cotta in place of custard might very likely be there as well. The rhubarb and orange combination is a classic which I have made in various forms over the years. But never in a preserve.

Ah, no - I had none of the tender stem to hand. However, my wife's recent search for a different drink had come up with the infusion on show here. 

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Those two ladles of reserved juice were boiled in a small pan until a set seemed likely... 106 °C on the thermometer and the consistency of a tiny sea anemone on a cold saucer. Just the one small jar in this trial run which then had one of the new tea bags dunked in while still very hot. When all was cooled, the bag was dragged from its sticky capture. The tasting revealed a subtle influence of rose and rhubarb. Very pleasing. Having made Earl Grey creams, I'm surprised it hadn't occurred to me before to make some sort of flowery, leafy tea additions to my jams and preserves.

I'll repeat the process, trying other flavours and different amounts. It certainly works... But I leave it to you to discover just what best suits your taste.

Let the tea-bagging commence!