“Reach out your arms, as far apart as possible – one high, one low – then just bend your wrist, but do not look!”, instructed the waitress. “Oh, and beginners like you must stand over the barrel,” she added. I followed her advice exactly but still ended up with a soggy shirt-front and damp shoes, wasting half a bottle.

Even though the cider was cheap, learning to pour it like a local wouldn’t be and accepting I could be thirsty for a long while before I acquired the knack, I invited my hostess to demonstrate proper form. Sure enough, her aim was perfect and my glass was soon two inches deep without the loss of a drop. “Now, drink it! Fast!” she cajoled. “Before it goes flat!”

I hadn’t counted on necking shots of cider at lunchtime, and wondered if I was playing the straight guy in a game of haze the foreigner, but as foamy, appley goodness cascaded down my gullet it started to make sense. Then, after taking my order for broiled razor clams and hake in cider, the waitress turned on her heel for the kitchen, leaving my glass empty. Now eager to drink some more, but reluctant to soak myself further, I reached for the bottle. “No lo mueva!” warned a finger-wagging old guy to my left. “She will pour for you when she returns. And, you should leave a drop in the bottom of the glass. It’s good luck.”

Thanking him for his advice, I sat back and looked around the white-washed room from my seat against the wall. Cut-off barrels half-filled with sawdust littered the blue-tiled floor between tables, along with the usual jumble of crumpled napkins, discarded toothpicks and cigarette ends. Through the open window, small gaily-painted fishing boats bobbed up and down, and their creak and bump as they nagged at their moorings offered a pleasant counterpoint to the hoarse cries of seabirds.

Luarca, on the Asturian coast of northern Spain is still a working port and, the tasca where I sat, the place to enjoy the morning’s catch. From the ruddy faces surrounding me, it was entirely possible that my hake had been landed earlier in the day by a fellow diner. The globe is so well traveled these days that it’s virtually impossible to find anywhere you’re the only foreigner, but in this place, during the off-season, I had managed it. In fact, I was the only guest at the only open hotel in town. An anomaly I was quick to appreciate, because it allowed me to slip into the natural rhythms of local life and prompted me to assume the most humble status, that of being nobody at all. Sure, it removed me from many things, but there’s an advantage to that when all you want to absorb is atmosphere – the feeling that five hundred years could pass in this place and the faces wouldn’t change. What Cees Nooteboom described as “the feeling that everything except time has stopped.“

My razor clams arrived, redolent of garlic and spicy with piperade, followed by tender hake with softened apples, their acidity perfectly balancing the sweetness of the reduced cider sauce. A side of fried potatoes appeared as another two inches of cider found its way neatly into my glass. Lazily enjoying it, happy and relaxed, I barely noticed when it was all gone and the waitress returned. “Postre?” she asked. “Hay queso de cabrales, flan, y frutas frescas, o si usted prefiere, un poco de cada uno.” I opted greedily for the latter, along with a nip of orujo, she returned quickly with a little of each – blue cheese, stick to your teeth caramel pudding, and a pear. “Ningunas manzanas?” I smiled. “Haven’t you had enough apples yet?” she joked back.

Chicken in cider is not necessarily a traditional Asturian preparation, though it might as well be, so while this dish is modeled on the hake in cider I had that day, it is cooked for much longer. Asturian cider is produced from small, tart crabapple type fruit that are no good for eating, the juice of which is fermented for up to six months in oak barrels. It typically registers only 5% alcohol, compared to the seven or eight degrees common in French and English ciders and is rarely carbonated, hence the habit of pouring from a great height to aerate, followed by swift consumption before the froth disappears. Spanish ciders can be found in the US, but domestic varieties like Woodchuck are perfectly acceptable for cooking with. The chanterelles were added to balance out the sweetness of the sauce with an earthy, autumnal boskiness and some slices of eating apple dropped in with five minutes to go offered some crunch and acid to what is a very satisfying dish.

I often think that living in a small scruffy New York City apartment is akin to a pioneer life in a log cabin somewhere remote. Sure, the commute is easier, but the myriad quotidien affronts and man traps of a city existence certainly resemble the perils of life on the range.

This is never more true than in winter when leaving your apartment on an icy weekend is about as enticing as wading through thigh-deep snow while being pursued by a pack of ravening wolves. On the those days, when opening your front door results in a nasty swirl of city trash blowing across your threshold, there is nothing better to do than hole up and compensate for your super’s inattention to heating your building to legally established levels by braising something porky for however many hours it takes to chase the chill back, at least as far the verminious bathroom and its dripping condensation.

In this case, it was some seriously chunky pork neck bones – whose original owner must have been a champion of his breed – braised in a rosemary-scented Guinness broth. Typical of parts of the English Midlands where malty, hoppy ales abound and rare breed pigs grow fat on acorns, apples and whey, this is an ancient recipe and in it lie the origins of the famous baked bean dish that, when transposed to the rather more Puritanical colonies, banished the beer in favor of the sweetness of readily-available sugar coming up from the Caribbean, so becoming Boston baked beans. For those pioneers, the presence of such a stew on the table during a long Massachusetts winter must have been even more important than for us hard-pressed city dwellers today.

It is also very similar to a stew my Great Auntie Annie used to make when a crowd of family descended on her Solihull semi-detached so that the grandkids could spend the day riding around the garden on her husband’s 1/16th scale-model railway. It’s not clear to me how often Great Uncle Roger used his train when there were no young guests in the house, but I rather enjoy the idea that if you peeked through the box hedges of a quiet Birmingham suburb on any given weekday morning you might find a highly eccentric retiree rushing around his back yard on a toy train.

For we grandkids, all the excited shreaking and ducking under low hanging bushes as the train chugged around at a decent clip always left us red-faced and famished. My Great Aunt, the youngest of nine kids, knew instinctively how to cater for large groups of young ‘uns, stretching a cheaper cut of meat with white beans, potatoes, and iron-rich ale.

The quality of the final product relies greatly on the quality of the beer used in the braise. Lager is of no use here and light beer (if it is ever worth drinking) should be completely avoided. A fine malty and/or hoppy English-style brew that will give strength, depth and some sweetness to the stew is what you’re seeking. Auntie Annie used to use Flowers’ Original, a floral English ale (then) made in nearby Stratford-upon-Avon. Similarly, pork necks with plenty of connective tissue and marrow are ideal because the former breaks down to thicken the sauce and latter makes a simple and rustic dish somehow luxurious.

Of course, unlike life in the country where heating is controlled by the number of logs on the fire, your apartment heating is bound to come on, clanking and groaning itself into overdrive, just as you plate this dish, forcing you to sweat through it, and all night long in your bed, in spite of the open window. The following morning, perhaps only to escape the dry, oppressive internal conditions, the grey, freezing city will magically appear more inviting and your struggle on the subway marginally less onerous.

I’m not very old, but for much of my youth in the north west of England, it was almost impossible to find fresh foods that weren’t local. Today such a statement seems like an echo of Victorian times, but, literally, that’s how it was until a supermarket was built behind the Knutsford courthouse in the late 80s.

I often tell my wife about the cheese stall at the weekly market only kept five kinds of cheese – Cheshire, Cheddar, Lancashire, and sage Derby were ever present, with perhaps a Wenslydale reasonably common too. If anything as unusual as a Stilton, from distant Nottinghamshire, appeared, it would generate as much commotion among the town’s housewives, who elbowed their way to the front of the queue to catch a glimpse of this highly perfumed foreigner, as if Julio Iglesias showed up sporting his tennis shorts. My wife usually responds that I should count myself lucky because when she was young there were only four kinds of cheese at her local supermarket: white American, yellow American, cheddar and Swiss and had anything else been available it would have been looked upon with extreme suspicion. Touché.

Making our weekly Tuesday rounds of the covered (indoor) market (the outdoor market sold mostly fruit and veg, bric a brac, and live pets, believe it or not) with my mother, on the cheese man’s left was the egg man, or “mister Chookie” as I knew him, on account of his perennial sales pitch “come tek a look at these lover-lee chookie eggs I’ve got for yuh!”. Unlike his fellow stall-holders, whose wares fell within a particular genre, the egg man also sold milk, orange juice and yogurt due to him being one of the younger siblings of the Sheldon family that owned the local dairy, and who, excepting market days, delivered these provisions to the doorsteps of the town’s residents.

Beyond Mr. Chookie was the fish man, Mr. Scales, as my mother used to call him, although at the time her pun was lost on me. Above his stall ran the legend “fresh daily from Fleetwood, Lancs”, referring to the port just north of blackpool where much of Britain’s catch was landed. That his stall was only open Tuesdays and Thursdays didn’t seem to matter. Whether it was due to her upbringing in blackpool where there is – rightfully – a great deal of local snobbery about the quality of the fish that goes into their fish n’chips, or whether because of an innate suspicion of fishmongers, my mother always eyed mr scales’s wares closely, casting a wary eye over his glossy fish, as if trying to discern if there was anything untoward hiding among the cockle-shells. Because we rarely had fish except on Fridays when we weren’t allowed anything else – even in our lunchboxes at school we had to mark the end of the week with evil-smelling “salmon paste” sandwiches – and because mum worked a full day on Thursdays, whatever we bought on Tuesdays had to last on ice in the bottom of the fridge until then (freezing fish made it taste all woolly, she always said), so freshness was absolutely crucial otherwise it/we wouldn’t survive.

Typically, the fish was cod, but often halibut or hake did service in the flaky white fish department. This was usually broiled and served with oven-baked chips, since as a nurse my mother couldn’t countenance deep-frying at home lest it give the townies the impression she was a hypocrite in her dietary exhortations, and homemade mushy peas, flecked with mint and tangy with a splash of malt vinegar. Apart from a distinctly non-traditional and rather dodgy-looking “curry” she made every so often, friday night fish suppers were my dad’s favorite – he still demands it to this day and he is about as agnostic an Anglican as you’ll find.

Instead of waiting for Friday, and going against my mum’s rubric of no-frying, but keeping with the buying of white fish on a Tuesday, we made a version of the Provencal classic, aioli garni, with a pan seared halibut fillet, steamed fennel and butter beans. Rather like much of the cooking I experienced growing up, it doesn’t look like much on the plate – the pale colors and the two sauces lapping against one another may seem bland – but the sharp tang of the garlicky aiolli with the surprising hot peppery-bite of the brown sauce against the muted flavors of the white fish and butter beans makes for an unusually rewarding dish. I am convinced that my mum would’ve enjoyed this dish a great deal, even though she would have asked why we didn’t save it for Friday night. As for my dad, well, sadly, he wouldn’t touch it on account of it humming with garlic. Too bad for him.

I was recently introduced to an Australian with whom I had a number of interesting discussions (that is not meant as a joke). The first, an hour-long discussion of the age-old cricketing rivalry between England and his native land is of no concern here, but the second, a frank exchange of views about the quality of sausages to be found in the United States has rather more relevance to the subject matter of these here web pages. His view, that American sausages simply aren’t up to snuff compared to the quality and variety of those available in Australia – a country in which the mystery bag has achieved almost legendary status for its role in the great Aussie barbecue – is not one I share, even if there were no other examples of fine forcemeat here than the glorious boudin of Louisiana, although, in his defense, he was careful to exclude American-made Italian style sausages from this otherwise careless dismissal.

Two men arguing about the merits of their sausage could be opening line of a grubby joke, but in fact, it’s a highly meaningful topic. Pork sausage, as it’s widely-known, is the world’s greatest food. I can think of no other food stuff which provides a comparable level of variety and satisfaction. The range of flavorings to be added to the basic mixture of pork shoulder and fat is almost limitless and the unctuousness of pork seems to be the perfect canvas for sausage-makers around the world to demonstrate their flair. All of which means that unless one is sufficiently motivated, like my Antipodean chum, to make one’s own sausage from scratch, one can take one’s pick from the myriad sausages available to us these days.

However, if you’re either deliberately bloody-minded or just feel like gilding the lily, you can augment your local sausage-maker’s offerings with flavorings of your own, which is what I did. Taking inspiration, once again, from Maxine Clark’s “Flavors of Tuscany”, I embarked with six fennel-scented Italian “sweet” sausage, adding some hot pepper flakes, a finger-nail or so of sweet pimenton, a pinch each of fennel pollen and black pepper, plus a generous teaspoon of just-cracked fennel seeds to the sausage meat after extracting it from its casings. Between two moistened palms, I rolled myself some micro-meatballs so-seasoned, browned them off in olive oil and paired them with a risotto bianco, garnished generously with fennel seeds, and washed it all down with an unpretentious Chianti.

As a speedy weeknight meal, it had the twin virtues for the ambitious home-cook of being easy and delicious while making me feel like I’d embellished the store-bought ingredients rather more than I had, which together with the great potential for sausage-based school-boy puns almost justifies posting about it.

Ah, Maine, with its mossy forests, its briny cliffs dotted with picturebook fishing villages, its bracing salt air, and its discount-tastic outlet malls! What could be more uplifting to the benighted soul of a grimy city-dweller than an autumnal visit to the cheerful redoubt of the gaily-painted puffin, the marshy lowlands of the lumbering moose, or the azure waters of the delicious lobster? Such was our spirit as we bounded north of the city, clad in windbreakers and LLBean gear two weekends ago. Little did we know that behind the facade of unspoiled nature’s bounty lay an altogether more sinister side to the state known as “Vacationland”.

Our pursuit of Maine’s finest lobster roll led us an hour north of Portland to the clapboard Victorian town of Wiscasset, home of Red’s Eats. Renowned for being the tiny shack that feeds big, Red’s stuffs their lobster roll with the meat of more than an entire lobster, and as a result has been featured in the pages of most food magazines, as well as almost every “big (preferably grotesquely outsized) is better” food show.

Lulled into a contented, almost comatose, state by a pound of their buttery crustacean, we puttered gently around Wiscasset’s myriad antique stores before following a “ye olde” style sign for “The Music Box House Museum” at a fork in the road. After half a mile, and with the shadows lengthening as the light faded towards dusk, we came upon an impressive white Victorian mansion toward which a brick pathway led through a pair of overgrown flower beds.

As we approached, a man and a woman exited the front door, giggling to one another and remarking how extraordinary the museum had been, before hurrying away, their laughter echoing in the gloaming. Encouraged by this show of enthusiasm, we entered. A high-pitched bell sounded and the front door gave onto a deep lobby from which a central, red-carpeted stairway led to the first floor. All was illuminated by a magnificent chandelier. Enchanted for a moment by the tinkling of nursery rhyme tunes from all around, we failed to notice the presence of a grey-haired, shiny-faced Mr. Belvedere look-alike who had appeared before us.

“Good evening.”, he purred, unsmilingly. His voice, like his skin, strangely oily. “You must be here to see the music boxes.” “The full, guided tour costs $20 each and takes at least an hour – longer depending on how excited I get.”

Guessing that he couldn’t get excited without actually killing someone, but still overcome by lobster, I could only gape back at him and grope for my wallet as “a freaking hour of music boxes fer chrissakes?!” flashed across my mind. Fortunately, my wife reacted much more adroitly, lying that “we’re not sure we have that much time – we’re meeting friends for dinner in Portland. Is there anything we can look at unguided?”

“Well, yes, there are a variety of coin-operated music boxes here in the lobby, and, of course, the gift shop at the back too.” He replied, gesturingly towards the dimly lit far end of the room. “So, can we explore the lobby? Great! Do you have any quarters, Jonny?”

Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by a desire to leave this place. The bright light, the uncomfortable atmosphere of the leering attendant, the inane tinkling of music boxes all began to freak me out. Somehow though, my clammy palms still reached into my pockets for some change. I pushed a coin into the polished slot. Three tiny, glossily-enameled characters in Chinese costumes appeared from behind their tiny silver doors and began to beat three tiny drums to the plinkety tune of Auld Lang Syne.
“All machine-operated, no electricity at all.”, murmured our guide admiringly. “Wow, that’s, um, fascinating!” my wife blurted out. Then, feeling like we ought to ask a follow-up question, I blurted “how does it work?”. “You’d find out if you took the tour.” He replied icily.

The music ended abruptly and unsure of whether to make for the exit or check out the other dark wood cabinets lining the lobby, we looked embarrassedly at each other. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the attendant reaching into his shirt-front pocket and loosen the top of a cigar shaped cylinder, briefly withdrawing something sharp-looking before replacing it and patting his pocket. Since he was between us and the door, I backed away towards what turned out to be a giant automatic organ, complete with dancing keyboard, recently acquired from Switzerland.

“Where’s the slot on this one?”, I asked half-jokingly, quarter at the ready. “There isn’t one, and, besides, this magnificent piece is not in working order anyway.” “It requires $20,000 worth of renovation and the person the owner wants for it is stuck in California.” Wondering if he was talking about himself in the third person, or if he was hinting that the restorer had been encased in concrete after failing to negotiate, my wife asked where the owner was. “Oh, he’s two towns away and won’t be back for at least a week”, he smiled creepily back. “Quite long enough for the mortar to dry after you brick us up in the basement walls”, I thought with a shudder.

Now, thoroughly freaked out and feeling hemmed in by the attendant who was now occupying a bench between us and the exit and still fiddling with whatever was in his pocket, we backed away further. As we did so, the sound of tinkling music boxes grew louder. Turning a corner, we found ourselves surrounded by what seemed like a thousand enameled music boxes, the cacophony of nursery rhymes was almost overwhelming and we were struck by a nervousness that had us giggling and fidgety.

“You’ll never find a better deal in the whole state of Maine…”, he said having followed us in. His voice trailing off. “… In what little time remains of your life”, I mentally completed his sentence. “I don’t think we’re in the market for a music box”, said my wife. “No, I mean these postcards of the museum. They’re a dime each. You’ll never see value like that again in your life”, the attendant corrected her ominously.

After a couple of moments during which the inane jingly music became so intense that I began to feel like maybe someone had actually flipped open my head inserted a music box mechanism in place of my brain, my wife quickly calculated that a dollars’ worth of postcards might be a good trade for getting out of there alive. Dragging me out of my stupor, she hastily picked a handful of them, tossed a dollar at Mr. Belvedere and hurried to the exit. It was only afterwards that we looked at them did we realize that the phantasmagoric show we had experienced was not a patch on the house tour and that the almost hysterical couple we’d passed on the way in must have taken the whole thing and had likely gone mad as a result.

After hurrying to the safety of our car, we drove back along the street, past the museum. No more than three minutes had elapsed, yet there was not a light on in the whole place nor any sign of occupation, only a peeling sign creaking in the wind and the rustle of dry leaves… We can neither confirm nor deny that a surfeit of lobster can lead to hallucinations, but as a precaution, we steered clear of it for the remainder of our stay in Maine.

One of the great joys of parenting is being able to do stuff with your kids, you know, like playing with them and watching them laugh. One of the great responsibilities of parenting is doing things with them because you have no choice, as this morning when I reached a stalemate with our 11-month old: either he needed to stop being so clingy for a few moments or I wouldn’t be able to get off the toilet. Depending on what kind of parent you are, you’ll find that one of these scenarios is more common than the other, and we’re totally not judging.

The same might be said of eating homegrown produce: some of it you thoroughly enjoy eating; some of it you eat because you have to. Our first real summer as more or less fully-fledged gardeners has certainly not been characterized by optimal growing conditions but we’re still finding that while there are joyous occasions when being creative with our horticultural bounty is a true pleasure, there are plenty of others when facing eggplant for the fourth time in a week becomes a chore.

Like parenting challenges surmounted, finding new and delicious ways to enjoy eggplant – of which, in truth, I’ve never been the world’s biggest fan – provides a great deal of personal satisfaction even if at the time it’s frustrating, because in both cases you emerge mostly unscathed but with a new-found appreciation of both the baby and the ingredient.

The recipe below – baingan bhartha – makes use of eggplant’s previously unappreciated attribute of being able to bind a sauce. Like its nightshade cousin the tomato, eggplant seems as comfortable in this role as any other we’ve tried with it. The smoky flavor gained through roasting is quite startling in its profundity – and it would be remiss of us if we were not to warn you that roasting eggplant over direct flame, like some aspects of parenting very young children, can lead to messy explosions. But we learned that the long-cooking and removal of skin diffuses that slightly cough-inducing, throat-irritating quality we’ve always noticed, replacing it with something approaching a sweetness, believe it or not.

First eaten at our neighborhood Indian restaurant, Kinara, this roasted eggplant and fragrantly-spiced sauce is typical of the Punjab. Best known these days among Westerners for the inimitable musical stylings of Punjabi MC, the Punjab is a region of densely-populated river valleys now shared between India and Pakistan but with a historical relationship with the Persian (Farsi)-speaking, Islamic peoples of to the north and east in Afghanistan and Iran. In fact, Punjab (Panjab in Farsi) means “five rivers”, and it is in this relationship to the baba ghanoush-eating natives and co-religionists of the Middle East that the dish’s roots lie.

Future preparations to try before either the season ends or we turn into eggplants ourselves include, of course, babaghanoush, but also other recipes from both near and far: preserved/pickled eggplant, pasta alla norma, moussaka and miso eggplant.

**Recipe note: If your spices are relatively old and not as pungent, try adding more of them to this recipe. I found that the eggplant really just sucks up anything that is added to it and I ended up adding a few more pinches of all of them. Taste along the way and, as always with cooking, adjust seasoning to your liking.

Our good friend, of whom we have seen very little recently, but who persists as an unwitting gastronomic inspiration to us – Juan Camilo – struck again recently when we spied a mess of veal brains at our local butcher. [I'm not sure what the proper collective noun is for brains, but the term seems appropriate given their form, even if something like "florettes" might be more marketable.] We are forever indebted to JC for introducing us to and instructing us on Colombian food, but also for taking us to Ali Kabab Cafe, happily for him, just across the street from his Astoria, Queens, apartment.

This celebrated, only in New York, hole-in-the-wall, 5 table, nominally Egyptian restaurant is run by the enigmatic, tri-lingual owner, Ali El Sayed, on the back of one tiny assistant, an oven and a single hot plate. These limitations combined with a menu that you should ignore in favor of the daily specials and Ali’s rather, shall-we-say, changeable moods, make for a unique dining experience, during the latter stages of which we were presented with a platter of deep-fried veal brains decorated sparsely with salad greens, a thin harissa sauce, and lemon wedges.

This rosy, if slightly hazy memory (made so by several bottles of heavy Algerian wine), was instantly recalled upon sighting said brains and my hand sprang to pocket, promptly unencumbering it of three and a half of your American dollars. It was only at home, several hours later, after this initial enthusiasm had cooled, that I was left to consider how to make the best use of my grey matter.

I should point out that this is not an uncommon occurrence and in the past, the excited purchase of unusual foodstuffs has frequently prompted breathtaking swerves of culinary daring, as seen in these here web pages, – an outcome I was particularly counting on in this instance since the four pound ox heart I also sneaked into the shopping cart had taken up all available room in the freezer.

But as I sat and stared at them – the passing minutes becoming quarters and then halves of an hour, the milky whiteness of the brains reflecting my mental vacuum back at me, echoing the blankness of my thoughts – nothing at all, even less than usual, sprang to mind. In fact, had not this vacuity coincided serendipitously with the harvest of our very first eggplants (2) and the watching of the TiVo’d episode of No Reservations in which Tony goes to Naples and eats a remarkable eggplant parmigiana, the brains might have been squeezed into a dark corner of the freezer and consigned to a lengthy hibernation.

Inspiration doesn’t always have to take you all that far to rouse you from your stupor, and in truth, I made no greater mental leap than removing the greens, lemon and harissa from that dish at Ali. If Ali’s brains and rudimentary appliances had provided him all that was necessary, I reasoned, there should be no impediment, barring inferior technique and lesser quality ingredients, to my own mental faculties doing likewise. Besides, I was certain that scrambled or boiled brains wouldn’t have any photogenic quality whatsoever.

Thus, the dish you see before you is a play on the combination of eggplant parmigiana and veal or chicken milanese: a roasted eggplant-wrapped package of red sauce and mozzarella seats a pair of breaded and deep-fried brains in cross-section.

For anyone still reading, I want to be clear that, certainly, I am sympathetic to those for whom brains might be an anatomical bridge too far. Had I not been in an expansive (read:tipsy) mood at Ali, I doubt I would have been so bold, though I am glad that I was. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that Juan Camilo did not find the brains to his taste.) Similarly, I am sure that even if it is interesting to them, it will be no incentive whatsoever to the skeptics, to learn that predators, including our very own ancestors, often eat the brains of their prey first, leaving the rest of the carcass until later so as to make sure they partake of the most nutritious parts before anyone can take it away from them.

Nonetheless, we swear that veal brains are the new sweetbreads – which may mean nothing to you unless you’re accustomed to a little nose to tail eating – they are mild, firm but almost creamy in the mouth, and have very little of the minerality typically found in organ meats. Despite only the remotest of chance that you will, we (as always) encourage you to give brains a try. They are by no means an everyday foodstuff and definitely demand a mental leap, but isn’t it true that almost anything really rewarding requires some thought?

Contrary to conventional wisdom, at this time of year when the garden is in a headlong rush to produce fruits, and you can almost watch the plants as they extend their sinewy tendrils into the air like a group of octopi doing the wave, it’s sometimes hard to know what to do with it all. This is a peculiar problem for us since hitherto we’ve been limited to the cultivation of one basil plant, one of chives, a miserable-looking tarragon, and a solitary pepper plant in pots on our fire escape, so were limited to harvesting only as much as wouldn’t kill the plant at any one time. In this context, the occasion of the annual pepper (singular) ripening was celebrated with champagne and confetti.

This year, while hardly drowning in produce, we’re finding that the gathering of some 20 or more cherry tomatoes several times a week, a glut of dark green basil and some of the most profoundly-flavored parsley we’ve ever tasted is presenting us with a conundrum: do we actually want to eat tomato and basil salad three or four times a week? Sure, we could be more imaginative, and if they were reading these lines, there would likely be a host of city-based food bloggers gnashing their teeth at our stupidity, but I am reminded of summers as a child when my grandfather’s garden would yield about nine tons of green beans during July and we’d be eating the damn things, steamed or blanched, morning, noon and night for a six weeks.

I almost feel like being deliberately controversial here and suggesting that this frustration with having to eat seasonally since the dawn of time is why we shouldn’t be so damning of the range of options offered to year-round us by the modern agro-food system. However, knowing full-well that would generate negativity among readers, as well as being more or less against our own ethos of attempting to tread lightly carbon-wise, not to mention foolishly contradicting the implicit healthiness of this practice that kept my granddad enjoying one-too many lunchtime sherries well into his nineties, I’ll keep it to myself.

Ever up for a challenge though, and, frankly, feeling rather bloody-minded, I tackled the issue of why eating seasonally can be boring head-on this weekend, and, making use of a particularly ripe pound of tomatoes, I made a kind of summery puttanesca, constituting a refreshing change from the raw fruit, but instead of stopping there and letting the seasonal flavors speak for themselves as we have been taught to do, I decided to pair the whole thing with some lascivious pork belly. I say lascivious because, even considering puttanesca’s origins among the evening workers of Naples, there’s something that makes you feel inherently guilty about pairing a fresh, organic sauce with about the richest most unctuous part of the pig.

Pan frying the slices of pork belly in its own fat, before using that fat as the base for my sauce, and deep frying the cracklins just for kicks, this was a dish to break any kind of kitchen monotony you’re experiencing, at virtually any time of year. We don’t eat a lot of pork belly and its measured use is kind of the key to remaining alive and vertical, but it does add a certain something that is literally unavailable from anything else, with the possible exception of guanciale. Indeed, had I not been frazzled by the heat and had pounds of fresh tomatoes weighing down on my brain, I would have used guanciale and turned this whole thing somewhere between puttanesca and al’amatriciana . However, I’m pretty happy that I didn’t, the briny, assertive character of the capers kept the belly’s richness somehow balanced, as did the acidity of the fresh tomatoes that might not have been present out of a can. In fact, I might consider eating seasonally more often if it meant I could dine in this kind of style.

An oft-heard, anguished cry these days chez nous is “there’s nothing to bloody eat in this house except baby food!”. Never actually true and rarely even close to reality, this refrain was aired again earlier this week when, left to my own devices while Amy enjoys a well-deserved week at her family’s shore house, I returned from work and opened the fridge. Having recently watched Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland”, I was reminded that the more one looks at something the more curious it appears, and an apparently bereft fridge began to transform before my eyes into a chest of plenty.

Curiouser still, I remembered that the small, peculiar-looking plant that we’d acquired in May which now resembled a bush and was in need of a drink, was none other than Plectranthus amboinicus, known in Puerto Rico as brujo oregano, or wizard’s oregano, and not really thinking about why I was doing it, I snipped off a couple of the fat green leaves and put them in my pocket. After watering the rest of our garden, and in an increasingly possessed mood that I’m blaming on the heatwave we’re enduring rather than the medicinal herbs secreted on my person, I began ransacking the kitchen cupboards, emerging sweaty and slightly crazed with a can of black beans in one fist and a jar of Haitian piklis in the other, convinced that together it all must feature in one kind of voodoo ritual or another.

Remaining somewhat unsure of my intentions but determined to step behind the burners in spite of the stickiness around my gills, I sought counsel from Mirta Yurnet-Thomas’ “A Taste of Haiti”, opening it entirely randomly at page 50 which showed a recipe for “Zepis”, a herb and aromatic vegetable blend used for the marinading of meats. How fortuitous that a rather tough piece of steak appeared, recently defrosted, on the counter? Again, rummaging through the fridge, and convinced that amid the browning and limp assortment of chilled vegetables I spied a white rabbit peeking out, I laid my hands on an onion, some aged scallions, and a head or two of our very own homegrown garlic. Chopping these all roughly and combining them with two tablespoons of piklis plus two additional tablespoons of piklis vinegar to create a marinade, I left the steak to tenderize, and went in search of a cauldron and broomstick.

An hour later, now highly perfumed with the dense, almost skunky, aroma of the brujo oregano in my pocket, and having drawn a blank on both these two sorcerers accoutrements, I started stewing the black beans with the oregano in a plain old saucepan. Some twice-fried green plantains spirited themselves in to tostones in a matter of minutes while the now tender and spicy steak was fired to a medium-rare. Left with a bold marinade and some black beans that though wildly aromatic lacked a little punch, I combined the two while the meat rested, bringing it to a satisfyingly thick and dark hubble-bubble.

Without ear of rat or leg of toad to add to the pot, I was unable to produce a potion that either shrank me or made me enormous (beyond slightly enlarging my already distended belly), but what I produced did have a hint of magic about it. The beans were among the best I have ever made, and the steak, similar examples of which can be found throughout many countries bordering the Caribbean, was satisfyingly piquant and juicy. I can’t speak to the exact causes of the fugue-state that brought on this bout of fevered concocting, and evidence of it persisting through the plating of the beans can be found in the plantain chip in the form of a pointy hat, but I can recommend that one be careful around ones fridge lest a parallel world beckon you from within.

Regular readers will most likely know a handful of factoids about us WANF-ers and our proclivities, among them: one of us is English, the other Italian-American; we enjoy making a wide variety of dishes, many of which we’ve sampled on our travels; and we have a young child. The more perspicacious among you will notice one or more incompatibilities in the above, especially with regard to the child and love of travel. Upon our recent visit with our English family, these came home to roost and were amplified by an exquisitely-timed bout of gastrointestinal trauma. Not that this made for a disastrous visit – far from it, in fact – but it certainly hampered our ability to sample local specialties and, after having looked forward to the prospect of an honest pub lunch for around 18 months, it made such sampling as we were able to undertake an exercise in sweet frustration.

Perhaps ironically for someone from such a small country, my knowledge of its regions is slight. I blame this on the bourgeois attitudes of my parents as much as on two back-to-back dreadful, cold, wet and windy family vacations to Wales at the age of five and six which persuaded us to forsake the British Isles henceforth for the balmier climes of continental Europe. However, I credit these early trips to Europe with my passion for good food, having been introduced to Breton buckwheat gallettes stuffed with local wild asparagus and grey shrimp in cream sauce when, through the owner of the gite and local parish priest, Monsieur Fleury, we acquired a pile of them, freshly prepared by the gnarled mitts of one of his flock, an ancient black-garbed widow named Madame LaPorte. That I was immediately and completely terrified by the sight of this one-toothed old crone lest she put me in her cauldron yet volunteered to visit her again the next evening to collect some more (my first halting words of French having been “encore des gallettes, s’il vous plait!) speaks volumes about the transformative effect of good food.

So it was that when we joined my family – sister, her husband and kids, plus my Dad and my step-mother – in an old sandstone farmhouse in the Cotswolds this past week, my expectations for what would ensue were mixed at best, chiefly featuring chaos of screaming children chasing chickens interspersed with light showers worsening to daylong downpours and limited access to anything worth eating. I am pleased to report that I was simultaneously almost completely right and completely wrong.

If there is a golden triangle for food in the UK, it’s arguably centered on the Cotswolds – a region of bucolic rolling hills made up of portions of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, and Somerset and bordered by some of the prettiest villages in neighboring Hereford & Worcestershire. For in these yellowish dry stone-walled fields are produced world-famous cheeses (single and double Gloucester, the original Cheddar, and Oxford Blue), some fine regional ales (Donnington’s, Flowers’), scrumptious ciders and perries, some of the UK’s best heritage breed pork (Gloucester Old Spot) and, believe it or not, a significant proportion of England’s “best” wines (a term I use advisedly, but in the knowledge that some 700 years ago, during the late Medieval warm period, English wines from this region were considered superior to their French counterparts. Thanks to my father for that priceless historical gem.)

Where we stayed, in the tiny hamlet of Hampen, one would have found it almost impossible to go hungry especially at this time of the year when nature is in a riot of growth provoked by 18 hours of daylight and regular gentle showers, and still-warm organic eggs, with yolks so rich they were almost red, showed up on our doorstep every morning. It was, therefore, a major disappointment when, laid low by a virulent stomach bug acquired somehow on the plane over, I was forced to do just that to avoid regurgitating these delicious vittles. Happily, in spite of my weakened condition, the spirit of those long ago days in Brittany prevailed and consecutive lunchtime visits to two of the Cotswolds’ finest pubs were enjoyed, if approached rather warily.

The Mount Inn overlooking the picturesque village of Stanton in Gloucestershire possesses one of the finest views of any pub in England. Taking in this charming vista over a pair of Donnington’s Ales and hearty servings of old spot sausages with cheddar mash and Hereford beef and suet pudding was a lunch to soothe the soul and calm the guts of even the most jaded traveler. Similarly, the Ebrington Arms in the eponymous Worcestershire hamlet lying just outside the county’s perennially best-kept village of Chipping Campden and adjacent to the fabulous gardens at Hidcote Manor, was a sight for sore eyes after half a week living on water and dry toast. Microbrews from nearby Stow-on-the-Wold helped down a wonderfully gamey pan-fried Gloucester old spot pork chop and a Ploughman’s platter featuring local ham, farmhouse cheddar and chicken liver terrine with a selection of house-made pickles.

Of course, these were just short breaks from the general pandemonium at the farmhouse where terrified chickens scattered in a harrumph of feathers at the gleeful charge of my three year old nephew and excited screams of “poo! Poo!” filled the air almost constantly. And sure, there were a good couple of days of cold and blustery rain that kept us frustratingly confined to quarters and encouraged breeching of the wine by late morning, but this was nothing to bear compared with the loss of appetite and downright fear of eating during those hellish first several days. If Beethoven’s personal purgatory was going deaf while conceiving his most brillaint compositions, then mine is almost certainly being physically unable to enjoy eating when surrounded by a veritable bounty.