Walking The Dog

One thing I like about catering on holiday is the inescapable and necessarily inventive resourcefulness of it all.  The - ‘Oh! I don’t have that ingredient’ moment, swiftly followed by the - ‘What shall I use instead?’ - slightly panicked moment.  And the - ‘Wow! This is good!’ - revelation that you determine to remember when you get home but will definitely forget due to having imbibed a holiday abundance of wine. And which due to the wine might actually not be as good as you think. Unless perhaps, the sozzled brain is capable of leaps of culinary inspiration that the non-sozzled brain is incapable of, due to sober adherence to the constraints of received rules on taste combinations.   Last night’s menu-en-vacances featured salmon on a bed of mushroom, white onion, and garlic with roasted potato wedges sprinkled with ground ‘saveurs epicees’ (which added good flavour - whatever they were). Followed by fresh apricots - drizzled with honey, liberally sprinkled wit...

Easter holidays - what an oxymoron. Yes to Easter, but absolutely NO! to holiday. At least, not in a household containing teenagers. Note - that containment is fairly elastic at times. Times when they need to   break-out - using the get-out-of-jail-(fairly, bar the petrol)-free card to visit girlfriend and girlfriend's kind parents who provide copious quantities of food for starving teenager, previously nourished only by a diet of German and Music revision. Having one stressed teenager is bad enough. Stir in a second teenager, opposite sex, opposite hormones, opposite views on most things, also revising for public exams; Littlest being driven by pocket money bribery to play the piano for at least 10 minutes every day; parents who have to work to pay the bills; the odd bit of major surgery; Four-legged-friend with a thorn in his foot; a house that refuses to clean and tidy itself; weeds that think the neglected garden belongs to them; ditto an explosion of spring bunnies and the...