Leftovers #196
The Cornish heatwave continues, which means browner bellies and salty hair and the most amount of books I’ve read in a week. It’s been just over a week of being back and I’m off again next Thursday, so I’m savouring the sunshine this side of the Atlantic, and prepping the house for various guests who’ll be taking over the mantle of flinging the front doors open in Penzance.
Notable things that happened over the past week:
Argoe and St Eia turned 5 years old and celebrated with a weekend of wining and dining, which looked like a Sunday of slurping back the most beautiful bottles of wine along with Angus’s fillet-o-fish sandos, then experiencing a hangover in real time a few hours later whilst sequestered in a dark cinema room on the inside row watching The Odyssey having not drunk any water for six hours.
I bought a portable barbecue and have decided that barbecuing will be my entire personality until next Thursday, and hopefully I can come back to it in September. See my courgette yoghurt dip that your bbq wants.
I picked up Pachinko after inexplicably reading half of it and putting it down a few years ago. It’s such a beautifully written book; I’m always in awe of authors who can so deftly write novels spanning multiple decades (in Pachinko’s case, it’s 100 years), and of course the fact that it’s written about Korea in the era my mum was born is particularly poignant. Now to finish the TV series…
The latest Rosudgeon car boot didn’t yield much apart from this beautiful Mexican vase that perfectly matches my Scandinavian 1960 folklore dining table. £5! For anyone visiting, Rosudgeon is on every Wednesday and Saturday, and is also a great place to pick up locally grown vegetables!
Good things to consume (bodily)
Back less than 2 weeks and I’ve already had about 4093825 dinner parties. No, just kidding, but I have been hosting and honestly nothing feels better than your mates crowded around a table with the breeze flowing through the house and the sound of wine being poured and cutlery clinking, or even the little moment of silence as everyone takes their first bite and smiles with satisfaction.
Went back to chicken and rice on Saturday, marinating a bunch of chicken legs in tamarind paste, lime juice, hot honey and miso paste. Cooked rice in a cast iron pan (you can literally cook rice in anything if you have the right rations; luckily I made a set of vessels to solve this problem, but ICYMI the ratio is 1:1.1), then added large pats of butter and placed the chicken on top then chucked the pan in the oven for about 40 minutes. The bottom of the rice as crispy. The chicken was tender. Served it with buttery, sesame-slicked pan fried tenderstem broccoli and a big salad.
Monday evening looked like swimming at Battery Rocks and bumping into friends, then getting a call from Fi saying she’d just caught a massive bass. I was planning on cooking crab pappardelle anyway, so said, bring it over and we’ll have a seafood feast. We barbecued the bass whole on the bbq (next time, I’d probably fillet that bad boy and even use some of the meat for crudo!), and served it with a big bowl of boiled potatoes and charred sweetcorn, salsa verde, a Greek salad with fennel, cukes, tomatoes, olives and feta, a massive salad and a little bowl of crab stirred through with lemon and Kewpie mayo. Luxury.
Got home at 9pm after a frozen marg at 45 last night, and whilst every fibre in my being wanted a burger and some fries, I resisted knowing I needed to use up things at home. So, as I watched an episode of The Hunting Wives and sipped a glass of cold vinho verde: courgettes sweated down in oil with a few anchovy fillets and a pinch of chilli flakes and let them cook for about 25 minutes until caramelised (v similar to the courgette yoghurt dip), adding a splash of white wine; then added al dente pappardelle with a spoonful of pasta water and stirred through the last of this batch of green sauce (I’ve made three versions this week already). Season to taste then served it up with a flurry of grated pecorino. Just really excellent.
Also made the perfect BLT. Popped a few slices of streaky bacon under the grill and cooked until crispy, dressed tomatoes in a little salt and rose balsamic, then layered onto bread (I only had rye but obvs it needs soft white bread – a bap ideally), with a thick swipe of Kewpie mayo, a spoonful of green sauce and a few crispy lettuce leaves. The next day I made a deconstructed BLT with eggs – poured the bacon fat into a pan and fried the eggs in that.
Good things to cook this weekend:
If you’re lucky enough to have friends like mine who catch lobsters (or just want to go a bit luxe at the fishmongers), then I implore you to make a buttery lobster roll. I want to run a restaurant that exclusively sells lobster rolls, crab sandwiches, garlicky clams, fresh oysters, briny martinis and tiny stubby beers.
The simplest pan-roasted chicken and beans in under 20 minutes. Forever being influenced to either buy a chef’s press, or just design one. I’m thinking the latter.
For pickle lovers, this tuna tartare with brunoised pickles with shoestring fries dusted with dill pickle powder needs to get made!!!!
Will i ever make this Korean stuffed squid? I hope so, it looks so beautiful and reminds me of gimbap.
Good things to consume (culturally)
I read Jem Calder’s I Want You To Be Happy in a couple of days. It was extremely easy to read but made me slightly depressed about the state of 35 year old men.
For some reason Blue Crush is really blowing up in my feed and is so nostalgic to my time living in India whilst working at a surf school. We introduced it to the surf instructors for the first time and their minds were blown (mainly by Kate Bosworth in a bikini). Must rewatch on the projector. Pipe’s not here, pipe’s over there! IYKYK.
Just got my hands on M.F.K Fisher’s Two Towns in Provence as I’d read somewhere she had spent time in Marseille and had some wonderful quotes from this book – she' writes about the food culture in both Marseille and Aix. Excited to dig in.
Jia Tolentino strikes again with an essay for The New Yorker about plastic surgery. This feels like a natural follow on from her 2019 essay The Age of Instagram Face, where she examines the disturbing and insidious obsession of tech creeping into our beauty standards. Why do we all want to look the same! Youth is wonderful but can’t we leave youth to the young and just act and look our ages?
Looks, particularly for women, have long been a capital asset, and smartphones systematized this neatly, providing users with digital tools to make themselves appear more beautiful in photos and videos, and monetized platforms to broadcast those edited faces, which, back in the real world, could then be retrofitted, via cosmetic intervention, to match. The cycle of digital and physical optimization produced a new ideal and new habits. The needle tip of a cosmetic syringe measures roughly a quarter of a millimetre: the Overton window of what happens to faces has widened in almost imperceptible increments.
I think this is the perfect playlist for this weather. I was rewatching How To Be Single (lol) and was reminded of that alt-J song and I went down a rabbit hole of old tracks in my liked songs on Spotify.
Love your hunger for all good things. I come from the home of lobster rolls (Nova Scotia) where buns are buttered and grilled on the outside, so fingers are buttery too. yum.