Читать книгу Spooning with Rosie - Rosie Lovell - Страница 37

I love dinner parties. Plotting, inviting, shopping, scrubbing, cooking…and devising the menu to fit my hatching plan: are we having a drawn-out dinner with red wine and kitchen dancing, and lots of courses, or are we having an impressive but light meal before going out like an army of ravers? And then, have we got enough chairs? I usually over-invite and end up with a ram of people around a small table. And then there is the mixing of friends, old and new. I love the melting pot.

My parents were always feeding people, beautifully, on a shoestring. Flowers crept in from the garden, chard and borage picked from the vegetable patch. My dad polished candlesticks, with Jimmy Cliff records playing in the background. As they sat down to eat, I’d sit in the dark at the top of the stairs and eavesdrop on all the family secrets. And when we were a little older, my brother Olly and I were included in these feasts of gratin, salmon and hollandaise.

My dinners are a little more informal than my parents’. I expect people to help themselves and clear the plates and really get stuck in. I probably cook more laid-back food, and things are always a bit makeshift, and quite often I forget some ingredients and have to improvise. When Alice and I lived together in a tiny little flat above a fishmonger, with no natural light, we managed to feed a stream of friends, and all around our glass-topped desk. And we were constantly broke too, so it was a thrifty but consistently exuberant business.