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FOOD, AND/0R MR BRENCHLEY
Something Of A Treatise
There’s just something about a kitchen, and always has been. It’s a place where I can be happy, busy, in control even when stressed, when I’m turning out a feast for twice as many guests as we expected. Karen calls it my man cave, and leaves me to it.
It doesn’t have to be four-course dinners for twenty people. These post-pandemic days, it never is, or never yet. Likely we’ll not go back to the Thursdays of yore, when friends knew there was an open invitation; they brought wine, I cooked, we had raucous evenings in the clubhouse. I did love those days, every week for some number of years — but up to two dozen people squished together in a single space is also an open invitation to a virus, so we stopped doing that. Mostly nowadays I’m just cooking for Karen and myself, and I love that too. Just now I was washing dishes when she asked if I’d make her a slice of toast. Simplest thing on the planet, and yet it’s such a pleasure. A slice of Mrs Bailey’s focaccia, which is currently our daily house bread, enriched with sourdough discard for extra flavour (you never actually discard your sourdough discard, right?), toasted under the gas broiler as God intended, a quick shmear of salted Amish butter, and hey presto. It’s a task, but never a chore.