Here’s tonight’s supper – and the reason I’m excited is not, actually, because it’s beef and saffron and borlotti beans but because I’m within a few aces of completing Yashim’s latest adventure in The Latin Reader.
It’s rather like standing near the finishing line, jumping up and down as your horse appears down the final straight… Clues to hook up, scenes to be set, with character twists that even surprise me – and terrible decisions still to be made. All that before I go back and read it all through from the begining, a luxury I will not indulge while I write. In the meantime I have to get up now and then and do something else, like this.
Those beans are particularly beautiful and, like the chard, they will be planted in double quantities next year.
The saffron was an afterthought – it was just silverside, beans, onions, garlic, courgettes, carrots and marjoram, with a bayleaf. But I have just been thinking about a recipe my father got from La Pistollera, a Spanish Civil War fighter, who came once to our kitchen and cooked her calamari with saffron.
If food is not your bag, you may derive a random satisfaction this picture of Osman Pasha, an Ottoman general, instead:
Your dinner seems marvelous but, honestly, I’m definitly more excited thinking of new Yashim adventure. I have only waiting for you and, then, for the italian translation. Not to hurry you.
Me too: dinner was great but not as great as that…
thanks so much for your cheerful and inspiring blog posts – now I just must find out what on earth these beans are and where I can find them! always something in your posts to bring new interest to the day…
Thanks Ceri – borlotti beans! As easy to grow as runners, and very good for autumn evenings. Dried they last into Winter. And look good on the stalk!
The prospect of the next Yashim leaves me very excited, your dinner – as its close on dinnertime here – slightly less excited, though it does look quite appetizing. The picture of the victor of the Siege of Plevna leaves me somewhat intrigued, though, as his life does overlap our hero’s. Hmmmm…..