Читать книгу Bad Cook - Esther Walker - Страница 14

My Husband the Eighties Hero

I often get asked how my husband and I met. I don’t know why. I’m never interested in how other people met and never ask. I’m always too busy being very worried to ask people questions like that. Worried about my face – has it gone red in the heat? Am I dressed in a lunatic and embarrassing way? Is anyone else going to eat that last mini Thai fish cake? Fuck it, shall I just get really drunk? Or shall I switch to lime and soda now in order to feel smug in the morning?

Other people don’t seem to have these concerns and instead calmly turn to me and say: ‘So how did you and Giles meet?’

Perhaps it’s because he is eleven years older than me and people assume that we met on some sort of website that matches desperate men in their late thirties with desperate girls in their late twenties. But we didn’t.

It was a set-up, an arranged marriage of sorts. My brother-in-law, who is an old friend of my husband’s, despaired of Giles’ impractical choices of girlfriends – none of whom found his drinking or swearing amusing beyond the first three honeymoony months – and my impractical choices of boyfriends, who were either gay or mad, or both. So he set us up, thinking that however disastrous a match we were, we would be almost certain to choose much worse on our own.

Well that’s what he says. I think it’s more a case of he thought it would be a laugh if Giles was his brother-in-law.

Giles and I had met once before we started going out. When I discovered he was friends with my sister’s husband I emailed him, being then as I was a fidgety and ambitious young journalist (i.e. a receptionist at a magazine). I briskly cited our connection and demanded a free lunch, as if that would get me anywhere in newspapers. Okay, said Giles. We went out to a pizza restaurant in Golders Green and Giles told me the funniest joke I’ve ever heard.

The waiters in the restaurant didn’t speak very good English and getting what we ordered throughout lunch had been a bit hit and miss. As the end of lunch drew near, Giles asked for a double espresso and the bill. The waiter looked confused. Giles repeated his request and smiled. ‘Ok’ said the waiter, and left.

Giles turned back to me and said ‘He’s probably going to bring us a steak.’ I fell about laughing.

We went our separate ways: he back to the tail end of a failing relationship and me home to my parents’ house, to pick my cuticles and fret about my spots. Giles was a terrific lunch companion and had a lot of advice about journalism, but we basically then forgot all about each other.

Two years after this first meeting, one hot dusty night in July, I got a phone call from my sister, instructing me to be at a friends’ book party that evening because Giles was there, and he was single. ‘Don’t wear that black jersey thing,’ she said. ‘Okay,’ I said, picking it out of the laundry pile.

Along I trotted to the party. It was sweltering. Giles was there looking like a man on the run, his hair standing on end, in a ratty old T-shirt and rattier jeans. He was brown from some holiday or other and was still drunk from lunch. His father was dying, he said, his fiancée had run off. ‘I wish it was the other way around,’ he added. Everyone laughed.

At first we liked each other for purely superficial reasons, being as we are both monstrously shallow. He had a thing for foul-mouthed, tarty, big-bosomed twenty-somethings in the media and all my references for what is handsome come from eighties movies: Judd Nelson; Rob Lowe; Tom Cruise; Charlie Sheen; John Cusack. You must have big muscles and look your best in a wife-beater and Wayfarers with your hair slicked back. You must also be able to do manly things like change a tyre on your own and get to the front of a bar queue. Memo to Zac Efron: you are adorable but I do not want my boyfriend to know all the words to ‘I Will Survive’.

So Giles and I fell in together easily. And when the shine came off things, we still, somehow, didn’t come unstuck. There has never been a crisis in our relationship that hasn’t been solved by a colourful slanging match, apologies and then a trip out for Chinese food.

We were on holiday this summer with a group of friends and one of the men there did not know how to dive into the sea. I couldn’t believe it. Otherwise handsome and winning, this man couldn’t dive! In order to get into the water off the boat, he would vault over the side railings and splatter into the sea, feet first. As my husband did a backwards dive off the edge of the boat, knifing into the water like an otter I thought: I could not marry a man who couldn’t do that. I also couldn’t marry a man who can’t whistle for a cab, carry me out of a burning building in his arms, haggle, parallel park on a busy street or do one-arm press-ups.

I know it’s childish. Hot guns, a nice tan and ‘cool hair’ are the things I wanted in a boy when I was 14 and yet they’re still important now. I don’t think that says good things about me. But at least I know what I want.

Anyway, that’s how Giles and I met. Now when we meet at a party, you won’t have to ask.

The mystery of mutual attraction often occurs to me when I am picking a recipe. I quite often find myself flicking through an entire recipe book or colour supplement shrieking ‘there is NOTHING in here!’ So what makes me stop, what makes me pick something out of the crowd? What gives a recipe the X Factor?

Recipes that are not too heavily reliant on carbohydrate will always catch my eye. Things without too many steps, without ingredients that I must hunt down in Thai supermarkets, which can be cooked without creating a vast mountain of washing up, will always make it off the page and into my pots and pans.

So this pan-fried quail and barley stew I picked up on my travels was always going to get made, at some point. It is really good, this. I had been curious for a long time about what cooked lettuce would be like and, it turns out, it is nice.

Quail and Barley Stew

For two

 100g pearl barley

 olive oil

 1 onion, chopped

 salt and pepper

 200g frozen peas

 500ml chicken stock (one of those tubs from Waitrose will do)

 25g butter

 1 tbsp flour

 2 jointed quail – okay this is a bit of a faff to do yourself and you’re left with very sad little quail carcasses, so you can enquire at your local Waitrose if they will do this for you at the butcher’s counter or simply go without the quail; the lardons (below) make this a perfectly edible light stew without the addition of the bird.

 some sprigs of fresh thyme

 100g lardons

 a handful of Little Gem leaves

1 Cook the pearl barley in salted water for 50 minutes, then drain and leave to steam dry.

2 Heat some oil in a pan and add the onion and a big pinch of salt. Cook slowly on a low heat for 15 minutes, without letting them get much colour. Add the barley and the peas.

3 Cover with stock and bring to the boil then simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

4 In an egg cup or small bowl mash together the butter and flour to make a paste. Plop about half of this into the barley mix and poke it about until it melts about. The idea is that it will turn your stew into a sort of thick broth.

5 In another frying pan, heat more oil and season your quail bits with salt, pepper and thyme. Put the legs in first and when they are browning, add the lardons. When the legs and the lardons look brown, add the breasts and cook for 4 minutes on one side and a minute on the other side.

6 Stir the lettuce into the barley broth and leave to steam cook for a minute. Serve with the barley as a base and the quail over the top.