Off school thanks to the continuing dreadful weather, Joe recreates his cancelled Food Tech class for our dinner tonight. Clare helps by holding the pan but otherwise the meal was his.
I like this pic: I like the various minuscule little details about our kitchen that you guys normally never see. The penguin calendar. The levitating compost bin. The mysterious letter ‘S’.
The weather remains glorious (sarcasm warning), thus provoking a wilfully uneventful weekend. The Mediterranean food stall at the Sunday market does its best in very non-Mediterranean conditions.
Among the subjects Joe is taking at school these days is cookery (aka ‘food technology’ or some other such euphemism). Every Thursday we are becoming used to him bringing home food that has always been more than just palatable. This ginger cake was lit with a candle as a proxy celebration for my Dad’s birthday (happy birthday Dad….). And very tasty it was.
Our leeks in the garden have attained considerable girth. What we did this year that has proved so successful I have no idea, they usually grow but have never been particularly big in the past. I’m not complaining though…
My 2017-18 football season opened at Salford City FC and a pre-season warm-up game against local rivals FC United of Manchester. The hosts won 2-1. You can read what I thought about the game, and see photographs of the day taken by someone much better at that kind of thing than me, if you purchase the next issue of When Saturday Comes (advt.). Salford City have big plans but their stadium, for all its recent renovations, is still pleasingly non-league in many ways. I like this catering van, its garish and gratuitously sexist decoration, and the worshipful posture of the customer.
There’s a very well known photograph of a pepper by Edward Weston — here it is — but he was a guy who had the time and commitment to spend days photographing this one thing and invest it with mystical qualities. I was just making soup. This is why I’ll never be a pro photographer. But I still like peppers as objects, the way they’re not as soft as they initially look they might be (like tomatoes) and inside they have these weird landscapes of seed and flesh. And the soup was nice too.
Wild garlic — the spring version of free food. (Blackberries are the autumn bounty.)
Gosh, it was an exciting day here in the household today, I can tell you. Still, I quite like this shot, considering the limited opportunities the day threw up; I like the various arcs and textures and that it’s nearly monochrome, but with that nice blue intrusion of the cup.
As August winds down each year there are some regular events, firstly, I get a year older and so the title of this blog becomes one more year out of date — that’s coming on Friday. To ease the pain of this, however, the garden finally begins to pay off. Blackberries, blueberries and rhubarb in this shot, with apples and plums gathered but unseen here (we have realised fruit is much less hassle than vegetables). There must be a photo like this every year around this time, and hopefully that isn’t going to change however far I take this blog.
A row of tents, from which are emerging a range of nice-smelling foodstuffs each lunchtime, seems to have established itself recently on Bridgeford Street on the uni campus. Probably it is just an exam season thing, but they seem to be getting enough business to make it a viable permanent fixture.
