A nephew of mine runs a very good restaurant in the East Yorkshire town of Beverley.* Under the present restrictive regime, not surprisingly, he has had to close. Food, however, is his passion and not just a business. Maybe he is just keeping his hand in and maybe he is trying to use up his stock, but every day he posts on facebook a photograph of his latest experiments. Whether these are just ideas for sandwiches or a full-blown cordon bleu main course they all look immensely tempting.
At a rather (much!) lower level we are doing something along the same lines. It isn’t always possible to stock up comprehensively during our once-a-week visit to the supermarket, so we do find ourselves improvising. Tonight’s dinner was “Isolation Risotto”. I discovered that we are pretty low on onions, so improvised that bit of the recipe with a mixture of wild garlic (from the lane) and chives (from the garden). It was pretty good, actually, although I say it myself.
Improvisation extends to other areas too. It is nice to have a little something to drink while working in the kitchen. I discovered recently that we have accumulated a curious mixture of alcoholic oddities over the years, and this seems like a good opportunity to clear out some of these strange beverages. The apple brandy was pretty good. Tonight, however, I discovered a miniature at the back of the cupboard that called itself “toffee vodka”. (No joking!) Consistent with the overall scheme of running down this strange collection of bottles I tried it. I expect that your imagination will have provided already a good substitute for any remark I might make. All I will say is that I’m glad it was only a miniature, although my wife did say that it would have made an interesting addition to a desert recipe of some kind. I wish I had thought of that first.
The virtue of improvisation has always been a theme in my family. One of my father’s favourite sayings was that, “Anybody can make do with what will do, but it takes a man to make do with what won’t do.” You get the general idea. I do want to insist that, as far as I am concerned, there are severe limits on the applicability of this philosophy.
I’m working up to a new composition, and have been pondering over it for some time. Regular readers will possibly remember that I abandoned a piece a little while ago, and this is a return to the fray. Suddenly I had an idea as to how the project could be revived in a way that met all my objections to the former attempt. I collected some reference photographs and made a preliminary sketch, and these were cobbled together into a collage that suggested how it might all work. The question arose then, of course, as to the materials I would use.
It has to be done in soft pastels, in order to match the piece I have completed successfully. The trouble is that it needs to be done on a tinted paper within a particular tonal range. I went through the contents of the plan-chest drawer in which I keep my pastel papers. The ones with the right tone were all the wrong texture, and (you guessed it) the ones with the texture I had in mind were all in colours that were too strong. After half and hour of humming and harring I think that I have settled on a paper that does satisfy my needs. I’m not having to “make do with what won’t do”, but it was a close-run thing. I can only hope that the result will be as satisfactory as was the “Isolation Risotto”.
*The Pig and Whistle, if you are ever in the area and the current movement restrictions are off.