On the last night before Christmas, Iris bumped heavily into Nathan, trying not to drop the carrier bags that were biting heavily into her cold fingers.

His face grinned and glowed in the bitter December night air. Come and have a drink with me, he demanded, taking over some of the bags and walking away from her, so that she had to follow him into the shopping crowds.

Did you get everything you wanted?

Iris nodded. They sat in the smoking section of a riverside tapas bar, with a mojito each, resting their knees against the radiator. The carrier bags formed a small fortress around their ankles, and they waited before peeling off coats and scarves, until they adjusted to the ambient warmth. Usually I get my Christmas shopping done well in advance, she said, wondering if she should have ordered a hot chocolate to wrap her frozen fingers around. Read the rest of this entry »

Searching the BBC food website for vegetarian recipes, I came across this Pumpkin Lasagne. As butternut squash has been something of a favourite at Casa Uborka lately, I thought I’d customise it ever so slightly; purchased ingredients and headed into a practice run for tonight’s veggie dinner party.

The recipe turned out to be the biggest load of nonsense I have ever read. I was about to email the BBC, lambasting them for publishing a recipe that has obviously never been tested, when I noticed that there was a second version of it, with an amended ingredients list, attributed to the tellytubbyesque Anthony Worrall-Thompson.

Unfortunately, the ridiculous cooking instructions haven’t changed. Anyway, by the time I discovered the updated recipe, I had already created my own, which I give to you here.

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I have never been a fussy eater, unlike my brother who used to be forced to eat one pea for every year of his age, which is not so good since he hit 30. I eat fish warily, and don’t care for offal, but none of this is abnormal.

In my twenties, I acquired a taste for olives, largely thanks to house-sharing with an Italian who cooked everything with loads of olive oil. It makes me very happy to have acquired this taste, because olives are lovely, and I can think of lots of good ways to spend a Saturday afternoon, but sitting in a bar with a bottle of wine and a plate of olives is one of them.

In the last few months, thanks to Pete and his predilection for sag paneer, I have started eating spinach. At first it was just the highly spiced stuff, and only in combination with that deliciously bland fried cheese; but slowly, bravely, I tried some baby spinach leaves in my rocket salad. I think I may have eaten them before, without realising what it was.

I’ve discovered a whole green world of new flavour and texture that I’ve never experienced before! Menus suddenly have a new section on them: it turns up in cannelloni with ricotta cheese, on muffins underneath poached eggs, mixed up with all manner of interesting things in Indian restaurants. I feel like a new kind of food has been invented just for me.

So, olives in my twenties, spinach in my thirties, and I fully expect to be joyfully consuming tripe by the middle of the next decade.

I went to two secondary schools.

The first one was a former girls’ grammar in Kendal, with a strict bottle-green uniform [and white knee-socks*], but I only went there for two terms.

The second school had a dress code, which meant that our school photographs looking like youth club gatherings, as we all stretched the boundaries of the code as far as we could get away with. I have a lot of long-harboured resentments about this school, but the dress code is a good demonstration of the apparently-casual student-centricity of the teaching style and the curriculum. Bear in mind that I’m talking about nearly twenty years ago [dear god], not the current txtspk era, which effectively suggests that my school was at the vanguard of modern educational technique. Hurrah. Lucky me.

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