bottom drawer

What can I say, but when good food comes along it sure does it in quantity. A last minute invite to my friend Butch's house turned out to be definitely a food highlight of my year so far. We arrived just after dark to have oysters thrust in our open mouths, and that was only just the beginning. One of his brothers, who works in a restaurant in Florida, had driven up with an entire carfull of seafood - oysters, green-lipped mussels, crabs, bay prawns, the stuff I dream about here. So we had: ridiculous numbers of oysters, raw and smoked on the grill, mussels steamed with rosemary and garlic with plenty of bread to soak up the juices, and the highlight, a huge cajun seafood boil of crab, prawns (shrimp to you Americans, I know), sweetcorn, carrots, red potatoes, onions and smoked sausage, flavoured with masses of herbs and spices thrown in the pot. The entire 5-gallon pan was drained and tipped out onto the table and we ate, and ate, and ate. So incredibly fresh, so real, so good. ...

It's been a party-full and action-packed weekend, for a change! which is just as well, because the grey weather was definitely not condusive to sitting in Beacon Street for hours on end. On Friday it was Carol's birthday, which of course meant Club 28 action... It was cowboy boots and bourbon all round for our first 'nightlife' outing of the New Year, kicking off for drinks at the Muckle House, followed by dinner at Buck's (exactly what it sounds like) and Club 28, all accompanied by three second-years that we'd drafted as our sober drivers due to the fact that they're all too young to drink - perfect! Then it was driving cross-state to Butch's for an amazing seafood extraveganza (blogged in full here , courtesy of his brothers who had turned up for some partying. It's always such an amazing break to go to his house which manages to be inimitably homely and relaxing (strangely like my parents house in Suffolk in some ways!) We ate and drank...

I never really kept a well-stocked freezer in London. Sure, I had frozen home-made stock and frozen peas, and some tomato sauce, but it was never really full. Here, however, it's another matter. I don't know whether it's my solo status here, the lack of a real social scene, the lack of food shops or what, but I've really discovered the uses of a freezer. I never have time to really shop and the shopping here is so uninspiring as to make that after-work visit to the Pig a chore rather than a delight. But with occasional gluts of produce finding their way into my hands, odd forays into the world of real shops and so forth, I now find myself more often than not cooking up at the weekend a whole array of things to decant into tupperware and serve in the week, and freezing many other things to boot. The contents of my freezer at the moment are: Tomato sauce (about 8 servings). Pumpkin soup (about 2/3 servings) Split pea soup(2 servings) Fish stew (1 serving) Fish stock (2 pi...

Well, we got our first wall up today! the step-by-step process, including f***-ups... We build the wall flat (sorry, no photos of that bit). Optimistically, bouyed up by last weeks advice by some Chicago architects who told us we could, we prepare to lift the whole 44'x10' thing up in one bit. Obviously, this doesn't work. It's real heavy. That means it's time for Johnny to cut the whole wall in half with the Sawzall. So, we get one half up! cheers all round. We get the second half up! Hooray!!! (for those of you wondering where the windows are, don't worry, it's just that we don't cut out the OSB straight away so it's stronger while we lift it up). Oh dear. Someone (Mr Freear) didn't actually line up the first section perfectly so we have to move them both so the wall fits onto the platform. After we've hammered loads of nails into it. to hold it down. Cue crowbar action. Cue more hammering. Hooray! it...

We got the exciting news today that more $20,000 houses are going to be built this spring, through now work of our own but through the work of Pam Dorr, the ex-outreach fellow setting up the housing office in town. One will be built by the family of a man whose house burnt down and who's currently living in a cockroach-infested trailer, and one will be built by three thirteen-year-old boys! They came up with the request for some kind of after-school activity and were keen on buliding things, and their parents were keen for them to learn some new skills, and so it came about, in the health-and-safety-less world of Hale County...they will of course have supervision, and possibly some adult volunteers. A fourth house may be built by prisoners through a scheme being set up by Habitat by Humanity. So suddenly things seem to be moving fast. It's great to have the opportunity to test out different versions of our prototype, and Lowes have agreed to give 50% off all the materials w...

Well, this I guess will have to be my entry for the beans IMBB. It's a simple dish, but given that the temperature today in my kitchen is around freezing point, it was about all I could manage, and exactly what I wanted to eat. It also sums up the essential qualities of the bean family - cheap, nourishing to body and soul, homely and divine in their simplicity. It's the poor man's food of the Middle East, known as megadarra, or mujadarra, or many variants of that word. Nothing could be simpler - lentils, brown rice, onions, some spices. Sounds pretty boring - yet somehow it's one of the best foods. The key is the caramelized onions on top which somehow lift this dish to the sublime with their soothing sweetness, texture and intensity. Basically, you put some brown rice on to cook with a bay leaf and salt, then finely chop an onion and some garlic and soften, adding plenty of ground cumin and coriander seed. Then add your lentils (ideally puy lentils, but ordinary brow...

Well, my first exposure to the American stage at the Tannehill Opry has been survived...It went off fairly well, I think, although I didn't play nearly my best. The Opry is an extraordinary experience in itself - an industrial shed in the backwoods, absolutely spit-and-sawdust, with metal chairs in rows and large signs proclaiming 'NO ALCOHOL ALLOWED'. Various generations of listeners drop by (it's free entry) to eat hotdogs and listen to the bands, ranging from us (by far the youngest outfit) to dubious gospel bands and ancient old men playing old-time bluegrass and country with wonderful crooning voices, picking fantastical breaks with absolutely stone expressions. Children run around being endlessly petted and fed sweets by the old ladies with gravity-defying bouffants. All rather utterly wonderful, seeming unchanged in all it's strangeness from circa 1955. The audience are all regulars and hugely appreciative, so it was a great warm-up for our other gigs in...

The bit of exciting news I forgot to mention is...as a celebration of getting the money back from when I was defrauded of my debit card details, I got an iPod!! finally...it's joyful. I get to listen to non-country music in my car. I've mastered the click wheel. It reminds me of my very first Walkman, bought in duty-free on the ferry to France with my school exchange trip when I was twelve. The joy of being able to listen to my taped versions of my father's Beatles albums on the train. Stereo sounds in my ears. I'd forgotten how great music sounds beamed straight into my head. I can listen to it in bed and everything.

OK, I've been totally lax in posting. But now it's above freezing (in fact, today was pleasantly sunny and t-shirt warm) I can update the world on events in Alabama... We've been building! having started this week with merely our foundations and all-important termite shields, we've managed to get nearly our whole floor platform done. It's starting to look like a house might actually happen. Everyone's understandably very excited about the progress we've made, though in my impatient way I still think we could have done it faster. But then, we all know very little about what we are doing, and we do keep nearly making stupid errors, so perhaps less haste, more speed is an apt proverb. Building a house here is a bit of a spectator sport - everyone with any relation to your client comes round to visit, add their tuppence-worth of advice and help out a bit. Larry Junior (her 17 yr old great-grandchild) has been a regular presence, coming after school to talk...

I spent the weekend doing odd errands and driving around Hale County with Johnny P talking shit generally, which is always fun. I found out all sorts of funny things about him, which I'm not at liberty to divulge online... ; ) Now it's gotten super-freezing cold, so blogging has been curtailed as it involves sitting in my sub-zero 'living room' (aka big tin warehouse). But we've got a wireless hookup on order, so soon I'll be able to blog in bed. Sweet. Despite the rather English temperatures, it's still absolutely beautiful here. Amazing light, clear blue skies and the catfish ponds reflecting the light like raw silk. Our house got some girders today, too. It's actually the perfect weather to work outside, as in the daytime it's not too cold and yet not warm enough to work up a sweat. Our client continues to reveal more and more of her off-beat and very old-time Southern sense of humour - ribbing us about our skills (or lack of them) and teasi...

It's a very small world out there. I tend to forget it is, because in Greensboro, Alabama, I never meet anyone who knows anyone I know. And whenever they ask me if I know such-and-such, I normally have to admit defeat. But in the world of blogging...it's quite a different matter. No sooner do I sign myself up for 1000 recipes' little black books than I find out that we have a friend in common, who was here at the Rural Studio a few years ago. In the world of food, meanwhile, tonight we retreated to the Mexican as our 'house' (big tin warehouse) is sub-zero. Which means this blog entry will be pretty short as I've got to return my fingers to the warmth of my bedroom (only heated room). Actually the fajitas were pretty good tonight. Did the job, along with the huge margaritas.

Well, the 'bean' theme is taking off and I couldn't pass by the opportunity to make real pork'n'beans - good American food with a nod to the St John cookbook which I got for Christmas. Plus it was a pretty chilly night and this kind of food is exactly what was needed. This really is an amalgam of the 'beans and bacon' and the 'pork belly with lentils' recipes in the St John cookbook. I really wanted to follow the instructions for one of these dishes precisely but a lack of ingredients meant it was improvisation time. My only regret was that I wasn't organised enough to used dried beans soaked overnight, as the beans you get in cans here tend towards the mushy, but I restrained myself from stirring them in order not to break them up. Also, I have no idea what American names for beans really mean (navy beans? great northern beans?) so it was guesswork about that too. But it turned out pretty damn fine at the end of the day! The recipe went someth...

It's as bad as it sounds. Actually, it sounds like it should be good, in a retro backwoods Alabama way. But no, Crispy Chick is a bad idea. It wasn't my choice - but Mustang Oil was vetoed by today's lunch companion, the venerable Johnny Parker, for reasons he did not care to share. I don't understand why Crispy Chick is black Greensboro (and white JP's) eating venue of choice, as it's truly horrible hormonally enhanced frozen and fried chicken, manky fries, nothing good at all apart form the fact that their sweet tea doesn't taste awful. I gave most of my chicken to Johnny's dog, Doofus, who ate it in the truck and slobbered all over me. Nice. And it looks like there ain't going to be no Taco Tuesday for a while, as the local Mexican suffered this morning from one of their employees not knowing how to drive a stick-shift truck and putting it right through the front wall and plate-glass window. Pretty amusing. Especially when I went by later and saw ...

It's been neck-down work this week as the new intake of second-years are inducted into the ways of the Rural Studio. This means we all work in big mixed-year groups on various projects, mostly helping with maintenance of existing Rural Studio buildings or doing work on some of the bigger in-progress projects that are currently on the go. So yesterday, I was cleaning the 'glass chapel' in Mason's Bend and today I was on the firestation in Newbern, helping the thesis team from last year complete this mammoth project. It's quite fun doing neck-down; as the name implies, it doesn't involve much thinking and you get quite a lot done. And in between, you get to lie about in the sun, eyeing up the men in a pleasing reversal of the usual roles. Apart from that, I'm getting ready for my first gig as an old-time fiddler, next weekend at the Tannehill Opry. Practising hard, and tomorrow I've got to go shopping for a gig outfit... It's exciting to play...

Last night, following up on the bean theme I did make one of my favorite things, the spinach and chickpea spaghetti I've blogged before here . I thought of it as an entry to IMBB but alas, my camera ran out of battery just at the moment of photographing my plate, and you know that pasta can't wait to be eaten. So it's going to have to wait. The history of this dish lies somewhere in the Southern Mediterranean. In Spain you often find spinach and chickpeas on the menu as a dish of its own. I don't know where my mother got the recipe from, but I do remember the first time it turned up on my plate and that she said she had just discovered it somewhere (as opposed to one of those dishes that's been part of your diet from birth). If you have left-over sauce from this, it's really great the next day as the filling for a frittata/tortilla/spanish omelette/whatever you like to call that dish.

The new Apple mini is a really bad deal for UK consumers if the prices quoted here don't change. $499 should cost around £270 at current exchange rates, not £339 as it's going to be sold for. £270...that would be less than what a 40GB ipod costs in the UK. Hmm... [spirals off into many more geeky thoughts about pricing policies and relative worth]

When were you last in a car with three convicted killers? for me, it was this afternoon, taking the two inmates who work on day release at the Rural Studio back to the prison cattle ranch where they 'live', driving with the ex-con who now works full time with us. A strange thought, given I would trust any of the three with my life. Two of them I can't imagine hurting anyone. (One I can, sort of, but know he would never do anything like it again. A lesson learnt. Plus he's fiercely loyal to those he likes, like me, luckily.) One of our inmates came up for parole and was passed. He's going to be leaving in a couple of weeks and we're trying to get him a job with the mother ship back in Auburn. It'll be sad to see him go, but hearing their funny-but-sad jokes in the truck on the way back to the ranch about life inside, I know that such feelings are ultimately selfish. Like they said, the ranch looks like a country club from the outside, but you should never ...

OK, I'm convulsing with laughter. Check out Query Letters I love (thanks to Crooked Timber for the link). And while you're at it, in today's long overdue browse through the blogosphere, I found the delightful and utterly true joke of DirectionlessGov , this extraordinary news (no more shopping at Waterstones - how can they be so humourless? is it just the Scots branches?) and, if you want to get really really angry, or as I did, dither between giggling hysterically and destroying my computer as I dithered between thinking it was a great spoof and all for real (it's all for real, sadly), look at God Hates Fags. How can something so utterly damnable and sick also be so funny? I also found SlowLab and I can't decide if it's too well-meaning and soppy for its own good or might possibly be onto something. Trouble is, they haven't actually done anything yet. It's too warm here. There are mosquitoes. It's January, they should be dead. What...

The theme for the next Is My Blog Burning? , in which I've always meant to participate but somehow always missed the deadline, is beans . Oh no. How to choose between the multitude of wonderful dishes involving any kind of legume at all? Is it megadarra, the Middle Eastern 'poor man's food' that is one of the great comfort foods ever? or cassoulet, daring the multitude of hardened opinions over how it should be made? or the green bean and rare seared tuna stir-fry I encountered once in Biarritz? or my mother's lentil soup? her butter bean soup? any of her soups (they all seem to include a bean)? or St John pork and lentils? or japanese sweet aduki bean soup and dumplings? or any of the million good things to do with a chickpea? The list goes on but I'm almost daunted by the size of the field. Beans are great, beans are cheap, beans are nutritious, yet I'm irresistibly reminded of the song of the chefs in Britten's opera Paul Bunyan, where the two cooks c...

Gradually we get back to work. After a morning of errands and bill-paying, we went down to our site after lunch. Miss Phillips greeted us with a call of 'I've got a beating for y'all!' from her porch. 'I'm gonna get y'all a beating, you've been away too long!' We stripped off the cardboard sonotubes, knocking off the lumps of excess concrete around the outside with a hammer, to reveal our concrete piers. Thankfully, all intact, none cracked despite pouring on the coldest day of the year, not the prettiest of sights but solid - as Andrew put it when he came by, a row of elephant's feet. Our house should not be going anywhere. Then we sat around on the stumps chatting about our holidays and our plans for the coming months. Everyone seems to have the same conversation over the holidays: what they might do next year and how their boyfriends might fit into it. I guess it's that typical Christmas conversation, though thinking this far in adv...

As an aside that I should have blogged about earlier, just before I left London I met up with a friend from Bam, Iran, scene of the previous Boxing Day quake that everyone's forgotten about. Pretty interesting and sad listening to him talk about what's happened there in the context of too much money being pledged to the tsunami effort. Basically, everyone's still in inadequate temporary housing, not much rebuilding has happened and the town's population is moving elsewhere as the pace of change is slow. I don't remember the world's leaders queuing up to outdo each other with 'generosity', or collecting boxes in every village shop, when 25,000 died and 60,000 were made homeless in an 'axis of evil' country. Given Indonesia's supposed Islamic militant links, the double standards and the 'politics of giving' make me, well, uneasy, let's say. When the hysteria has died down, are we allowed to ask why this level of competitive giving c...

As an aside to the last post, see this post from Jane Galt and the inane comments about food poverty that follow. I put my oar in, of course, but some people had better get out of NYC and see how the rest of America has to shop and cook.

I went shopping today to stock up for the new semester. Super Target, I have to guiltily confess, but look here, there's no ethical shopping to be done around here for 100 miles. And even Super Target, which is the doyenne of the West Alabama shopping scene, is totally miserable. Not even free-range eggs, which every corner shop in London now sells. No free-range chicken, much less any other free-range/organic stuff. A meat section the size of a Tesco Express [extremely small, if you're unfamiliar with English superstores] and an even worse fish section with evil-looking, glowing, vacuum-packed prawns. Weirdly, no real parmesan although they sell rather horrible-looking pecorino, and in general, totally miserable American versions of European cheeses, all plastic and inedible. And I don't understand what happens to the rest of the sheep when the only cut of lamb they sell is a loin chop. Of course, if you want it frozen in a cardboard box ready to go in the microwave, you c...

I went for a drive this morning to re-acquaint myself with American roads. It's all fine until you reach the sprawling strips on the outskirts of most medium-sized towns (my example being Tuscaloosa) where you have a 6-lane road with exits left and right and every store is set back miles from the road with a huge carpark so it's really difficult to know which tiny little exit road leads to which store. You end up cruising in the middle lane going too slow while people in the outer lanes whizz by, as you scrutinise the signs on either side and test your powers of 3D deduction to the extreme. And then, if you're like me, you get stuck driving round the loopy suburban residential streets behind the big stores with no way of getting to where you wanted to, which in any case is some miserable mid-American excuse for a shop that sells nothing you want and makes you feel obese and stupid even if you aren't. Much nicer is getting mildly lost on the county roads, navigating b...

Back to Bama, and goodbye to fresh fish, varied vegetables and ethnic restaurants. For old time's sake, we go to El Tenampa for our back-home dinner, say hello to Jesus (the manager), Blair (the waitress) and the other staff. Then it's back home for green tea made in a saucepan (why doesn't rural America do teapots?), blogging and bed for my jet-lagged little self.

It's back to Bama after the break, via a night in Atlanta with my housemate, who used to study there. A last breath of 'civilisation', in the form of wine on the porch with friends and hip-hop at MJQ's, the classic Atlanta club full, on a Friday night, of black b-boys from the 'ghetto' inner-city neighbourhoods, bling black girls, and white wannabes and hipsters. Driving though Atlanta reinforces what a perverse and typically American city it is; wealthy white students living in heavily gated communities in 'hip' (ie mixed-race and a bit on the wild side) neighbourhoods, miles of run-down black neighbourhoods without a white hipster to be seen, trendy graffiti-art cafes and a magazine called Creative Loafing, horrible new gated developments springing up everywhere, aping 'dense' and 'urban' block types but with no street access except through two sets of alarmed gates. Warehouse developments for hip, left-field young professionals, who i...

I got in an Arsenal game before returning to Alabammy! and what a cracker. Missed shots, great saves, always nerve-wrenching, a salvaged draw. Great football but shame about the result. Having also seen art (Gwen and Augustus John, the 100 Artists See God show at the ICA), gone to the movies and gone to a club (alright, DJ bar) I have now had the full spectrum of London cultural experiences during my brief trip. Though maybe I might try to squeeze in a bit more art before I leave...so many good shows I've still not seen, as is always the case.

Yesterday was a grim and miserable day - cold and rainy. Plus we were going to the football game in the evening so we needed a post-match meal that would warm us up again and could sit happily in the oven for the couple of hours we were going to be gone. Hence this sort-of amalgam of a St John-y boiled chicken with a more traditional pot-roast, the principle being to brown the bird all over, stuff it in a big pan, surround it with vegetables, almost-cover with water and lay two strips of bacon on its breast, leave in a medium oven for 2 1/2 hours. Actually the weather wasn't that cold at the game, but we nearly lost (just salvaging a draw). Coming home, unfortunately the bloody thing wasn't actually cooked. I blame it on my boyfriend's oven, in my one it would have been done. But in his it was too low a heat (his isn't as fan-assisted as mine) so we had another half-hour of drinking beer and post-match deconstruction while we whacked the heat up for a bit. As a result i...

Another meal with a bunch of wonderful food enthusiasts, this time in a restaurant in London. The company was assembled informally in honour of Sybille Bedford, legendary writer and in the best tradition of eccentric, forthright English women travellers, and consisted of her and her French companion, the actress Aliette Martin, and Jill Norman, formerly in charge of the food list at Penguin, and her husband Paul, along with my parents and me. Old-fashioned French food, old-fashioned French waiters such as I haven't seen for a long time (dinner jackets and bow ties and all), very good wine (ah, a 1990 Margaux, mmmm...) and lots of food talk chez Le Colombier in Chelsea. Sybille has just completed her latest (and possibly last) book, and Jill also has just finished a book on winter food. A sneak preview: apparently snails with spinach are the latest discovery. My father met Sybille without knowing who she was over dinner a long time ago, and their shared love of travel and food has k...

So many things to report after the holiday blogging lull (too busy eating and drinking to be nerdy). Back in England seeing lovely English friends, walks in the countryside, lovely old pubs, big New Year's Eve party in the barn in Suffolk. About 20 good friends of mine and some neighbours, lots of lovely food and masses of red wine around tables in the barn (see below for the 'pre-party' shot), big bonfire and champagne at midnight out on the marsh, with Big Ben's bongs supplied by a portable radio, watching all the fireworks go off at all the villages around the estuary. Magic, seeing them explode silently, reflected in the water, under a bright moon. Then back to the barn for crazy coloured cocktails courtesy of some friends bringing a cocktail-bar-in-a-basket, angostura bitters and all, teaching my mates (and my mother) to two-step to some good ol'time bluegrass, much whirling and twirling and giggling and drunken violin-playing and chewing the fat with frien...

It's really fantastic to go to dinner with friends who are also amazing cooks and excited about food. Last night at dinner with old Suffolk friends, so much of the conversation was about food - not just the fantastic spread that they produced for us but also food in America, food in the South, previous meals we'd had together, recipes we'd traded and their subsequent development, family trade secret recipes (being a Jewish family, it's cheesecake) and the famous Chestnut Cake Incident. The Chestnut Cake Incident occurred when these friends came to dinner at my parents' house, when I was approximately four years old. The husband is a fantastic dessert and cake cook, and would always bring some amazing concoction to any dinner with us. This time it was a sweet chestnut and chocolate cake. I can remember it vividly, sitting on a plate on the chest in the hall where we eat, the pale-ish brown colour, the light smooth texture, the smell, the taste... It made such an impr...

The above was the menu for our New Years Eve party (blogged in full on my other blog here ). Most of it, I hate to say, was cooked not by me but by my parents and my neighbours. However, the pumpkin pie was entirely the work of me and my boyfriend, faithfully following my instructions in the kitchen. We actually made two with a little bit of experimentation going on: the first exactly as the recipe said (mixing pumpkin puree, milk and spices with three eggs beaten whole) and the second with the eggs beaten separately - the yolks mixed in with the pumpkin and the whites beaten very stiff and folded in. The conclusion was that the second method is by far superior. Everyone at the party thought one pie was mine and one my boyfriend's, trying to play us off each other, and I was very proud to be able to say that no, we collaborated! Unheard of in my kitchen-control-freak world, and no fights occurred either. It's fine when someone just does what you tell them to do... PS. Witness t...