More reasons for grace

There's a comforting lilt to posts I've written in the past about food and family. The lovely Amy Ephron would poach (no pun intended) food posts from Miss Whistle and purloin them for her own One For The Table, and I'm honored she did so. Here is one that just popped up - Thanksgiving: Cooking for 22. (Amy Ephron is a wonderful writer - you must check out her A Cup Of Tea.) And so, in this weird time where Mercury is retrograding like billy-o I'm coming back to the calm of writing about food (and thus, everything else) in this my favorite place to write. Thank you to those of you who still come back to Miss Whistle. I'm enormously grateful.

Something happened just two days ago that changed us on a cellular level - the arrival of Spring. On Thursday everything was wet and sodden and grey; huge swathes of pasture were under water, unable to receive even another drop, beyond absorbency and tired of it, clearly. A whole bunch of exasperated fields and lacklustre solitary daffodils, bowing at awkward angles, their limbs broken and feeling awfully sorry for themselves. Even the bunnies were hopping lackadaisically. Bare, dull, beige trees stood around like surly teenagers. Good Friday was as you would expect it to be: sad. And then, on Easter Saturday, the world burst open, birch leaves popping, wild garlic shooting, green fractals expanding spirally, chaotically, joyfully. A million more birds appeared and sang very, very loudly, like the annoying competitive family at the back of the church. Far too many descants. Hooting geese charged overhead in twos and threes like Messerschmidts, and the jackdaws and magpies and pheasants did an elaborate Morris dance outside the backdoor where the chicken scratch corn had been scattered. It was glorioius mayhem. Walk in it and you could feel every little organelle and microchondria bursting inside you, just bursting with joy. All the things that had been closed down, were absolutely brimming, every single thing that was true and honest and just and pure and lovely and of good report, were filled with praise.

And you think I'm exaggerating?

We were positively giddy, walking hand in hand down Pangbourne High Street, stopping for bread and cheese, and tulips for my mother. Swallowing, as you do, when you can't quite believe what you're seeing or how you're feeling; every little cell buzzing like a Murakami-style smiley face, every flower nodding towards the energy of the sun.

Lunch was artichoke soup, made with artichokes from one of the men C rings the church bells with, scrubbed and sliced thinly and put in a pan with some shallot and milk and a tiny bit of white leek, an Ottolenghi recipe. It's served with a spinach and hazlenut pesto. We had bread from Birch's, some very good cheese from the Pangbourne Cheese Shop (and some lovely Cornish Truffler that my sister brought with her).

Easter lunch was a bit more of a challenge. Nine people and four small children. A gluten and dairy intolerance to work around, and no assurance of sunshine. Sunshine is awfully helpful when there are small children, dogs and a lunch to be had; they often do what we adults should learn from, take off their socks and shoes and charge around on the grass like musketeers, or gleeful benevolent marauders, allowing the earth to ground them (it does). I don't cater very much to small people tastes. Most of the children in our family are happy to eat most things, so I don't have to make plain pasta or cardboard pizza which seems to be generic when people raise uncurious eaters. Instead we made a slow cooked lamb shoulder, marinated in parsley and coriander and cumin and lemon zest and garlic, which goes in the oven as soon as you wake up. It sits on a bed of celeriac and carrots and garlic heads, big chunky pieces. Even people who have uneasy relationships with lamb because of school horror stories like this. We served it with Turkish flatbread, homemade hummus (from my Lebanese family in LA), a chicory salad with oranges and hazlenuts, a Persian cucumber, tomato and pomegranate salad with mint, dill, olive oil and cherry molasses (I'd run out of pomegranate molasses) served on a smearing of labneh. And Persian jewelled rice with barberries, orange rind, slivered almonds (pistachio intolerance) and pinenuts, and I added some fat yellow sultanas for good measure. The tadig could have been better, it was a little pale gold not golden brown, but no-one complained. And then rhubarb from the garden, which C bakes in the oven with honey, and the Claudia Roden almond flour and clementine cake as adapted by Nigella. Whipped cream or coconut yogurt.

The sun did come out, briefly, and filled the garden with light. It had been dry enough for a few hours that people could sit on the grass, or on benches which surround the wall. It's funny when it's not your own family. The conversations are about people you don't know as well, and you have to try a bit harder to make sure that everyone is comfortable. Merging cultures is hard. Misunderstandings with your own family are what they are, fast flare ups that get settled quickly and with hugs. Mix-ups and communication fails with people who aren't your family or haven't been your family for long are awfully complicated. There is no shorthand, and each word that is chosen must not be assumed to be understood. Meaning could be entirely different. It's easier, almost, to assume that people are color blind. This way, at least, doesn't lead to unintentional hurt. Different cultures do things in different ways, and it's our job, those of us that doh-si-doh our way into new communities, to observe, appreciate and embrace other ways of doing things. Just as my Danish grandmother who was born in 1908, the daughter of a consul and shipowner who traveled widely all over the world and brought home exotic spices, tastes and Chinoiserie, married a Norwegian doctor who was more interested in the theatre than the social etiquette of the time. Just as my upper middle class Norwegian mother who had grown up in the bourgeoisie of Oslo came to England in 1960 had to adapt to my father's farming family, with dogs everywhere, dusty houses and tweed (and she laments, no tablecloths). Just as I left England in the height of Sloane Ranger rah rah rah, weekends in country houses, and a completely blinkered, naive, frankly blind, view of the world, had to embrace the crazy, loud, joyful Lebanese/Jewish/Catholic/White Bread American family of my husband's family, and then from the all the things we'd learned create our own culture, our own way of doing things, searching through the generations of stuff and coming up with a big, glorious hybrid approach that tried I suppose to take the best bits of everything and marry them together to find something inclusive that worked for everyone and saved the individual bits we really cared about. And now, after all of that building, to find a whole other somewhat bewildering landscape, even after all of these years (I have been back in England since January, 2017). More room to adapt. More reasons for grace, I suppose.

I've been thinking a lot lately about life feeling like a wobble board. About trying to keep everything in balance, about how you can think too hard about your legs shaking and focus too much on them, looking downwards, instead of looking out, and fixing one's gaze on something beautiful and bright (it helps tree pose in yoga, so it must help me, one thinks). About how we struggle to regain equilibrium, and grab for joy when we find it. (Every day can't be like that sunny Saturday in Pangbourne; every day can't be giddy.) But in fact, that is the nature of life, that Tao shape, the light and the dark, the happy and the sad, the scarcity and the abundance, the change. That is the only thing we can hold on to. The only constant is that balance/change between the extremes.

There are bumblebees on my magnolia tree, so fat I can see them from my desk.

In my beginning is my end. TS Eliot.