We ate many mushrooms in France

We ate many mushrooms in France. We ate orange chanterelle schmoored down in drip drip butter and entire heads of garlic smoosh-smoosh in pan hot and swipe the pan clean with pieces of pan-toasty bread with chop chop parsley. And then out of the pan with our hands for breakfast the next day.

We ate brain-spongy morilles hidden half in somewhat soggy omelettes and drowned in jus under lamb chops from French lambs.

We seared more chanterelle in more butter and ate big bowls of them with still-chewey barley. On top we put perfect temperature comté because we were where comté comes from and we didn’t have a fridge.

Another time we grilled them and put once-chopped parsley and lemon juice squeezed on them.

Memory steaks

I remember the adults looking at her. My sister had just ordered a $40 sandwich. She was 8. Sure, this was Smith and Wollensky, New York, the 90s, and the sandwich was more steak than sandwich. And ok, this sandwich has since shaped my dreams and, more often than not, frustrated my expectations. But she was still an 8 year old ordering a $40 sandwich in a, if not the, quintessential New York steak house, built on the bones of countless cows for big men wielding big knives, big accounts, Brook’s Brothers suits, and a napkin around their necks. And she didn’t blink an eyelid. And she ate it all.

A Sauerkraut Spritz because why not?

It’s noisy and your eyes need a moment to adjust to the dark. There’s no room for elbows and people keep jostling past, the jostle all the more so a jostle because of the full skirts and aprons. Everything is dark wood, copper or printed cloth. And antler. There’s a lot of antler if you count up all the buttons. You smell onions frying and yeasty clouds of beer. It’s cold outside and you feel your face flushing from the warmth, from the beer. Those skirts are swishing back and fourth from the kitchen, their matrons handling big trays laden with heavy food. A bowl is placed is front of you. The cold has made you hungry and everyone around you is already eating. Inside it is a mass of steaming bacon and other pig’s anatomy, slivers of cabbage, juniper berries, bay leaf and thickly cut apple. You have primeval German brot (bread) on the side and are already spooning out yellow senf (mustard) with one of those little wooden spoons. 

The little Kickstarter stove that kicked it

“What can’t it burn?” was the first thing I asked when he’d finished reading me the shortest user manual in the world.

Two hours later and hungry, we knew the answer.

It was the first day of summer after a grey longest day and we’d put all our eggs of expectation in one basket after dedicating the best part of the last two weeks of a damp June to moving. We’d survived a variety of homelessness; finding shelter within boxes and cooking by candlelight, and it wasn’t the adventure we’d marked it out to be. But today was marked to be different. We were going to have fun. And so, also in our basket, we’d packed Surinamese blood sausage, bread, garlic, a faro salad, ¾ a bottle of wine, a skillet and Alex’s new Kickstarter stove; solar powered, clean burning and all chrome. 'Cus that's fun.

We have a new table

I’d never done the math. That’s the first thing I thought when I saw all those pastries piled high, like lobsters crowding a fish tank. Danishes are, of course, from Denmark. All those miles of dough I’ve unravelled. Dunked. And never once with a thought to the genius nation from whence they came. But now, there they were. Threatening to roll over the cinnamon rolls, which, now I thought about it, I did know were Danish.

I had a fresh-off-a-5-a.m.-flight flash of reasoning. Denmark, responsible for at least two of the world’s best-known pastries must, therefore, be a land of many many pastries. I had four hours before my connection. I had four hours to try all I could.

I woke up over Greenland, another moment of discovery. Greenland, according to the dimension of airplane window 23C, is black rock jetting up from the ocean. The ocean seems to run within and through it and is sometimes ice, very blue or black. When I looked it up, I read that the ice sheet covering the island has pushed the land down 300m below sea-level to form a basin. 

Newark, New Jersey is a swamp. A swamp sunk with industry. I was welcomed to the United States of America by a party of 50 cranes and a facefull of air conditioning.

I spent the next two days on the 38^th floor of the World Trade Centre, cooking. Cooking in Bon Appetit's test kitchen. More marble than you could shake a stick at and when you got a fork from where the forks are kept, you faced skyscrapers.

We were shooting spring food and when I arrived in Connecticut it felt like high summer. I’ve had my first corn of the season, gone barefoot and battled mosquitoes in bare legs. 

Back to New York and up other magazine towers. This time a day at Good Housekeeping learning the properties of dry ice. Next was one day out of 10 watching the experts make ready meals ready to be shot looking like a meal. In between there were loaded pizzas, a face-sized pastrami sandwich, my first knish, cheddar cheese flavoured ice cream and dinners with the people that got me there.

Three weeks later and I have a new postcode. I live on a boarder in a big room with a table that fills half of it. The fridge is a yellow-striped smeg which, when it was delivered, made me a little afraid because it made the corner glow. Now it looks like it's on permanent vacation. 

We're drinking drip-coffee out of pickle jars and eating pickles off my prop plates. The relic filter drips out coffee at record speeds next to a huge grinder from the restaurant worth a 1000 euros in blades but the mortar's pestle is now only a 3/4 of what it used to be pre-move. We're so used to cooking by candlelight that ever since we put a light in the kitchen, I've not seen it on; whereas there's been a fire on every day of the last two weeks of June. A vacation of sorts. 

Slow roast harissa chicken

There wasn’t enough room on a postcard for the harissa stories of Tunisia. Everywhere you went there would be harissa, homemade and slightly different to the one last night or that which caused the stain on your shirt at lunch. Some were hot, most bright red, others only barely to be glimpsed under fathoms of olive oil. All were to be soaked up by toasted bread.

At home we make our own version to accompany almost anything we eat with blackened lemons: from steak to lamb, bulgur wheat to dark greens. It can be made as spicy as you like, thick spoonfuls of red or, the more olive oil you add, more of a marinade. Or do what the postcards say: serve with hot garlic bread and dip.