Читать книгу Bad Cook - Esther Walker - Страница 9

Connie’s Mango Salsa

Let’s go now. Let’s fly you and I away from this gloomy now, to a different time, back six years, to when I was working on Londoner’s Diary, which as I’m sure you know is the gossip page of the Evening Standard.

One day a new girl appeared in the editor’s office. The editor liked to have a lot of girls around and she was very mean to all of them. She thought she was in The Devil Wears Prada or something and that being mean to your assistants is terribly glamorous, but we knew that we were actually in a scummy daily newspaper office in West London and that people who are mean to their assistants are bitches who will rot in hell.

The editor’s girls didn’t usually last. They all had office affairs eventually, which then went sour, then they went on sick leave, then never came back. But Connie, or ‘Beautiful Connie’ as she quickly became known, was different. She was smart. She couldn’t have been less interested in the skinny boys on news or any of the grizzly bears on the back bench. Her boyfriends were always incredibly tall mega-Sloanes she’d known since she was six, who thought journalists were dismal little people. Yet there was a steely glint in her sleepy brown eyes, a hard edge to her long blonde hair and a no-nonsense air about her flower-patterned mini dresses.

The editor had finally met her match.

Connie was my best – and, sometimes, only – friend at the Standard. I would often poke my head into the editor’s office, where she sat drinking pot after pot of fresh ginger tea that was so strong that when you drank it, it felt like your whole face was on fire. She would shriek, quietly: ‘ESTHER!! Oh my God I’ve just eaten an entire Bounty and TWO packets of Maltesers!!!’

I have been thinking about Connie recently because I came across a mention of a mango salsa, which she used to make for me in the weeny galley kitchen of her top floor flat in Notting Hill. Roasting hot in summer and freezing cold in winter (‘I think another bad January might finish me off’), Connie’s flat was a miracle of survival, like those plants you get in the desert, or 100,000 miles under the sea.

Anyway she almost always has the ingredients in her kitchen for this spicy mango salsa, and it’s quite, quite delicious. I realize the above whimsy makes it sound like Connie is now dead, but she isn’t. She’s still there, in that same deathtrap flat, training to be a shrink.

My husband and I had this with a very rich jerk pork belly, which didn’t work at all; it was too rich and gacky and yuk. It would be very good instead with some plain steak, or a tuna steak (although these days one cannot really eat such things) or a plain white fish like turbot or pollock.

Connie’s Mango Salsa

Makes enough for 2–3

 1 mango – diced

 juice of 1 lime

 small handful fresh coriander

 a sprinkling of fresh mint

 1 chilli – chopped finely, seeds removed

 1 avocado, diced

 salt

1 Put everything in a bowl and mix.