Pointless fretting. And chilli. (And hob mess.)

Hello Kitchen. How’s everyone getting on? I know all times have been Strange for six-plus months now, but these last few days have felt like a new Strange to me: a weird cusp-land, hovering between a return a normal (schools! universities! offices!) and the looming sense that a speedy dash back indoors could descend just as rapidly as it did the first time round. (And, indeed, has already done so for people in many locations.)

I am, to be honest, hating it. Not naturally a creature given to enjoying Choice and Possibility, the full lockdown was awful but in a strange way comforting: we were all doing our bit, it was grim, but it was necessary, and it was helping. Now, the personal risk management (and relying on everyone else’s risk management) is freaking me right out. I made my first Trip yesterday (after very nearly six months of having visited no settlements beyond our village save to walk straight through them in a countryside-walk sort of way). All of 10 minutes on a train there and back, and outdoor picnic, a visit to a shop (the Polski Sklep, praise be!), and 30 minutes in the opticians picking out new glasses frames.*

30 minutes! In a small-ish room! With people! It’s left me examining every in-breath to see if I feel coughy. Top tip: if you examine every in-breath you will eventually feel coughy. Checkmate.

I know I’m extraordinarily lucky to have got this far without ever having had to do anything remotely risky, and this trip was by choice, too. Having been able to isolate so effectively is probably what’s making me so nervy now. I’m hoping that will ease as I get more practice (I will have to go back to the office – in London -- at some point. And before that, my chap starts small-group in-person university teaching next month.). But what if it doesn’t? What if I get more and more anxious?!

Worrying about worrying. Well, if that isn’t me in a nutshell.

Anyway. At least the sun is shining.** I was not ready for full Autumn just yet. Not at all, so this is a blessed relief for as long as it lasts. And cooking is, as ever, a great distraction.

An aubergine was lurking in the bottom of the fridge. They keep astonishingly well, but the time had come for this specimen, so I hunted around for a recipe that uses aubs and carrots (which keep surprisingly badly, don’t you find?) and found this burnt aubergine chilli. After a false start last night (do not start a thing that includes the lines ‘cook for 20 minutes’ followed by ‘simmer for at least 90 minutes’ at 6.30pm…), I now have it bubbling on the hob.

Recipes that start with charring something over a gas hob are so beguiling. It feels so primal. I don’t know if it makes any difference in the final dish, especially in one with such a comparatively low aubergine quotient and such a lot of other flavourings. And it does make a mess of the hob when the aub starts leaking juice.



But, I did remember to close the kitchen door before the smell reached the fire alarm.



The charred skin smells not entirely of creosote. I fall firmly into the pro-creosote-smell camp: there was a small timber yard near the station not far from home when I was small, and on a warm day the smell would waft nearby. Probably not quite all the way to our back garden, though you did sometimes hear the train whistles from there. But over the intervening park, at least. Redolent of hot afternoons, dry grass, ice lollies.



I’ve followed the recipe almost to the letter. Well, for me, anyway: no kidney beans because we haven’t any in, and cocoa powder in place of the chopped chocolate (less messy), and fresh oregano not dried, and I expect to forget the lime juice when we come to serve.

Here it is at the start of its Big Simmer. There’s really a heap of flavouring in it, so I’m hoping for good things.



We’re having it with home-made oven chips, because the potatoes need eating. I will report back.

---

*A dreary tale, do not ask unless your prescription also tips the scales at ‘derisory NHS vouchers’, in which case let’s commiserate about the humiliation of it all.

**Portentously climate-changey weather, I know. That’s a worry, too.