Lost Vagueness

Found:

1 Orange cardigan

1 bag with man's shoes/Asian lunch

1 pink and black scarf

Please apply to the lost property office of The Underground Restaurant to pick up!

Announcement: chocstar will be serving desserts from her chocmobile van parked in my driveway this Saturday evening. Her blog post about this event.

Mexican theme this week. I haven't entirely decided upon the menu but it will include the following:

Tequila cocktail to start.

I love making salsa's so I shall be making a couple of different ones plus guacamole. Tortilla chips.

Chile sin carne, chocolate and chipotle recipe with black beans, rice, sour cream, cheese, tortillas.

Salad.

Desserts from chocstar

Coffee

£25

I've given up finally on paypal (account blocked for 180 days, cos I'm a food terrorist!) and have the English speaking and helpful people at Wegottickets handling bookings now (link at top right hand side) so that I can spend less time on the computer and more time in the kitchen. 

Vacherin night at The Underground Restaurant

Menu:

Kir cava.

Olives.

Thai soup with coriander, lemon grass, lime, coconut milk, tiny green pea like aubergines. Garnished with mint, red pepper, spring onions.

Baked mini Vacherin (one between two)

Baby cornichons, silverskin onions, green pickled peppercorns, small firm potatoes (Sofia, Exquisa) Aga baked with Malden Salt, thyme and olive oil, served in a large copper pot.

Straight out of the oven focaccia.

Romain lettuce, red pepper, pine nut salad by Charlie Nelson, retired chef. (He's an ancient 24 years old and an absolute gem).

Tarte tatin with organic creme fraiche.

Cognac, XO Imperial Courvoisier, courtesy of Around Britain with a paunch rounded off the meal nicely.

Many people were lucky enough to win bottles of wine with their £10 raffle tickets!

24 people expected. 22 turned up. Possibly 2 didn't come because I forgot to give them the address. Gulp. Only realised at 3 in the morning. (So please remind me if I forget).

Had lovely trip to La Fromagerie in Moxon St to pick up the mini Vacherins. Cheeses there I have never seen before, we tried a Spanish blue with a tangy aftertaste, a 'cabecou' goat cheese.
I chose Vacherin for tonight's menu partly because the season for this cheese will soon be finished.
Went to Portobello Road market on Friday morning to buy more chairs...got 5 chairs and a table for £40. My restaurant now has 7 tables!
Much juggling of baking tins between the 3 ovens of my Aga. Moving trays to the top to get browned.

Discovered one fossilised tarte tatin in the oven this morning.

Street food London/Portobello

                                                     

Portobello Rd/Goldborne Rd. Near Cafe Lisboa. After the midday call to prayer, stalls selling Moroccan food crowded with men in traditional dress. You could be in Marrakesh.

•  Lentil and chickpea soup in deep rich tomato £1.50p. I was given a spoon and invited to share a bowl.
•  Fish, prawns, mussels,olives, tomato and onion sauce £6 freshly barbecued served in a foil tray.
•  Foil wrapped kettles containing sweet mint tea.

My recipe book

Eek a mousse

This is turning into a diary blog for The Underground Restaurant...

Val day was great but the usual mishaps occurred.

I was on schedule, despite my van breaking down last week and having to shop online. My teen wanted to go to a party on Friday night. I drove her over there.

On entering the house, chaos, around a dozen teenagers running around hysterically and one clutching his head. He was drunk and had fallen over, hitting his head on a rock. I took a look and you could see his skull through the cut.

The mum of the house, one of those liberal ones, pleaded with me to stay with the other teenagers while she took the boy to the hospital.

Her son was freaking out "Will we get done for this? He's been drinking."

I googled it and drinking at home is legal for kids over five years old in the UK.  

I do give my teen a little wine with her meals, or maybe a small glass of champagne. But these kids were glugging back whole bottles of vodka and gin.

My teen returned from her French school trip a week ago sneering at another child who blacked out after drinking about 6 inches of vodka.

"Huh, what a light weight!"

"I'd collapse if I drunk that much vodka" I told her. 

Cue more sneering.

"Really, it can kill you."

I ended up babysitting in this house until almost 1 pm. A waste of an evening.

Luckily a young trainee chef, Charlie, came to help me on Saturday. He beautifully blanched the asparagus spears, dipped the cherries in chocolate and, being the son of a furniture remover, knew exactly whether an additional table would fit through the door.

This time the Daily Mail photographer came to cover the evening. He was quite useful. He opened the door for guests. 

My sister and I kept getting the giggles as we were ladling out the soup.

"Is this the maddest thing we have ever done?" I ask her.

"Well there was the time that we were both vicars at Glastonbury and married people." she said.

"And the time when we did a stand up routine on food and astrology in a Camden town restaurant..." I added.

"But this is the maddest... yeah" she says

In the middle of plating up the mains, a woman spilt red wine all over her white crocheted cardigan. My sister wanted to stop everything "Where's a bucket?" and help the woman. 

"STOP IT" I hiss "Fuck her cardigan I don't want people's food to go cold"

I looked around the corner. The cardigan was hideous anyway. I bit back the impulse to say "Chuck it, it's vile". I do realise that a proper restauranteur would not say this. Only beautifully tanned top models can get away with white crochet. It looks shite on English women.

Later we got the giggles again. I'd miscalculated the amount of chocolate mousses. I needed one more. Hush hush I sent sister-woman out to buy one from the local supermarket, get like a 'Gu' high quality choc mousse.

My sis sneaks back.

"Bad news, I could only get the Somerfield version" she says.

We look at it. It's got fake whipped cream on top. The consistency of the mousse is blancmange, sloppy and pale coloured. I doubt there is any chocolate in it at all. People are slipping past us to smoke on the balcony. We are trying to hide the packaging.

We put the Somerfield 'mousse' in a Le Creuset ramekin. Still looks awful. We try to cover it up with chocolate dipped cherries. No better. 

I take a deep breath and ask two of the diners, that I actually know, if they would mind sharing one. I fess up.

The end of the evening, eyelashes and minicab cards.

Marco Pierre White

It's a long interview but I love what he says about food. At around 16 minutes he talks about wanting to eat in someone's kitchen or living room. He says his wife's mother is one of the best cooks he knows. I'd love to invite him to The Underground Restaurant, anybody know his contact details?

Street food

Whenever you travel you are advised not to eat street food. If you follow this advice you are missing out, it is the nearest thing to eating like the natives, aside from moving into their mother's houses.

Thai fish cakes for instance, I only ever found on the street in Bangkok, sold in packets of 5 or 10, freshly fried and piquant. Here in the UK, Thai fish cakes are a starter, 3 for around five quid, and mostly from frozen ready-made catering packs.

In Mexico the street food is a revelation and I'm quite prepared to risk hep C or whatever disease, although the amount of chili and lime involved may kill off any lurgies.

Behind my hotel in Mexico City I bought little dishes of roasted yellow sweet corn, with red pieces of chili, coriander and a squeeze of lime from one woman, who rinsed our dishes in a bucket of grey soapy water next to her tiny wheelie stall. 

In Oaxaca, expert Indigenous hands roll and stretch Mexican-style pancakes, a kind of tostada, on wok-like charcoal burners, ten's of stalls lined up selling the same dishes. It's hard to choose which one. I randomly pick my stall based on 2 criteria: the expressions of culinary rapture on customer's faces; which woman's apron I prefer. Apron wearing is an art form in Mexico and Guatemala and I bought a couple. Indian women wear them as skirt decoration even when they are not cooking.

I had the vegetarian version of these 'tlayudas' with Oaxacan stretchy cheese, home-made salsa and mole. You can choose from several different kinds of mole, brown, black, red, yellow. Mole is a kind of spice blend and sauce sometimes with chocolate, but used in a savoury way with chicken. 

Indian street food is excellent. But every time you go to a stall a middle-class Indian gentleman will come up and warn you, in a whisper, not to eat it. I didn't care. And I didn't get sick.

I loved the fresh mango and papaya covered with brown salt and lime. (In Mexico they do the same but with lime and chili). Creamy sour lassi's whipped up with a wooden stick and served ice-cold in a stainless steel tall cup...manna! Scoops of spicy chickpeas in bowls made of leaves...breakfast was often spent crouching in a queue waiting for freshly patted-out potato paratha, made kneeling near the ground. 

I went to India some time ago and sweet chai was still served in clay cups. The railway tracks were littered with shards for there was no shame in chucking them away, being biodegradable.

Recently at an Indian restaurant in Euston I had little fritters with sweet yoghurt tucked inside and a tamarind and coriander sauce. I do think street food should be brought indoors with one exception...

Chip shops in the UK: I know our mothers told us never to eat on the street but a portion of chips, eaten out of paper on a rainy British street is always better than eating the same indoors. Is it the temperature contrast of your fingers briefly dipping into soft warm salt and vinegared potatoes that makes the whole experience so good?

One of my French exes, when he came to live in London, became obsessed with the different chip shops in Camden and Kentish Town. He tried them all. 

One Chinese chip shop guy uttered the immortal phrase "Open or closed?".

My ex:"Excuse me?"

Chinese guy repeats: "Open or closed?"

My ex looks around at the door with it's sign:"but you are open no? I think this place is open..."

Chinese guy, patiently, penny dropping: "Do you want the paper on your chips to be open or closed?"

Selling honey by the jug near Oaxaca, Mexico.

Val day

 Nobody to spend Valentine's Day with? The Valentine's day mascara.

I'm sticking to similar menu to last week to maintain interior calm but will gradually branch out into my other repertoire.
But have upped the aphrodisiac quotient.
Asparagus- perhaps due to spear shape, but a well known aphrodisiac.
Rocket, pomegranate, garlic and chocolate all have similar qualities.

This weeks menu is:

Glass of kir royale

My own marinated olives

Roast cherry tomato and garlic soup with fresh baked herb focaccia

Rocket salad with pomegranate and asparagus spears

Gratin dauphinoise with saumon fumé/vegan and veg options

Mousse au chocolate with cointreau and chocolate dipped cherries

Love hearts.

£15. plus drink.

Then everyone will make love! Especially if I slip some 'e's into the soup.

Washing up

Laundry, clearing tables, recycling bottles, cleaning up.

I now have a permanent restaurant in my living room!

The Guardian article has led to further interest and many bookings.

My daughter got teased gently at school by teachers who saw her photo in the Guardian. They asked if they could come to the restaurant. I'm fine with that but my teen is horrified by the idea.

One blogger put my full home address on his blog. Spent Monday flipping out about that. Er...it is an underground restaurant. It's like telling the police about an illegal rave. He's taken it down now.

I have installed a pre-donate system with Paypal to avoid the problem of 'no shows'. Every normal restaurant gets 'no shows'. But an underground restaurant has no walk-in traffic. Profit margins are non-existent therefore if people don't come, not only would I have to live off their uneaten food for the following week but I also lose money which could threaten the future existence of this project. 

But it's not working too well. Paypal only has robots. Even their humans, which it takes hours on the phone to get through to, sound like robots. Stephen Hawking-type proto-American voices saying 'mam'.

I'll stick with Paypal a little bit longer but the work and frustration associated with it makes me want to rip my own fingernails out.

If you want to book the Paypal address is 

Msmarmite Lover (theundergroundrestaurant@gmail.com)

not undergroundrestaurant without 'the'

or googlemail

All payments to the paypal account are going to fund a long lusted after Kitchenaid mixer... and then if I'm lucky, a robot coupé. 

The aims of this project are humble. I and my friends wish to:

• subvert the system
  
• encourage a do-it-yourself attitude
  
• reinvent traditional notions of motherhood in Western society
  
• cook for other people
  
• stretch myself on a culinary level
  
• make new friends
  
• enable them make new friends (you can talk to other tables at my restaurant)
  
• convert the internet world to face-to-face interaction
  
• make real food (no towers or plate grafitti)
  
• be an ''invisible meta-legend vagabond anarcho-restauranteur".
  

How's that sound?

The opening night of the Underground Restaurant.

French tire-bouchons

My guests arrived on time. My teenager sat in the corner on a rocking chair looking like a scene from 'The turn of the screw'. Then, greeting her with almost choking relief, my sister arrived to waitress. After handing them a complimentary glass of kir royale to celebrate the opening night, people were seated for the first course.

I introduced several food bloggers to each other, Bellaphon, Foodrambler and Londoneater, the virtual colliding with the real. Which is partly the point. This is 'put your money where your mouth is' time. Anybody with a digital camera, a way with words and a budget for eating out, can put up recipes, review food. How many food bloggers then invite you over to actually try the food for yourself?

I disappear into the kitchen where the Guardian photographer has set up. I am tempted to go all Nigella on her, licking spoons artfully for the camera. She tells me to stop it immediately.

I have a table of friends here, a writer Caroline Simpson and two famous astrologers, Bethea Jenner and Michael Day, but otherwise I don't know anybody. 

I confess only half-joking to the Guardian photographer that this is all an elaborate scheme to find a boyfriend. I have no one to cook for, my teenager won't eat hardly anything, so I invite strangers over.

Horton Jupiter arrives saying his plus two will not be coming as they are too drunk. These are the people for whom I made extra mousse au chocolat. I think for the future I will ask people to 'donate' in advance via paypal. I was annoyed as I had turned down reservations for tonight.

I cover the kitchen surfaces with bowls to serve the roasted cherry tomato soup, placing a basil leaf in the middle of each, accompanied by a hunk of warmed up herb focaccia.

The gratins are cooked, the potatoes are soft in their cream but the tops need browning. I juggle with the various Aga ovens, alternating which dish of gratin will go in the roasting oven. I've cooked 4 baking tins worth of gratin, enough for 15 people.

Horton comes into the kitchen and strokes my Aga. We discuss Jeremy Clarkson's comment that Gordon Brown is a "one-eyed Scottish idiot". 

Which I say is "factually true".

 Horton then  announces that David Blunkett could not possibly be a good government minister "because he is blind. Der!"

"What's that got to do with anything?" I ask.

"He's a stupid right-wing twat." states Horton.

"Yes. He should not be in government because he's a stupid right-wing twat, agreed, not because he is blind."

My sister shoos Horton out of the kitchen. The Guardian photographer, who has been a witness to this exchange gasps. "You can't say stuff like that!" 

I smirk to myself: well done Horton, you just lost the politically correct vote, she is from The Guardian after all.

Soup bowls return. We start to plate up the gratins, a relay with myself digging them out of the tins, my teen rushing them over to my sister who will add the two salads. I look over and realise my sister has piled the salad up high. The plate looks like something Popeye would eat.

"No, no, no. Not like that. Smaller. A scoop. Then trickle the dressing over!" I command.

The main course served, I go into the living room and have a little chat with each table. I'm playing so many roles here; cook and hostess. I'm wearing a smeared white apron. 

When the plates return I notice somebody hasn't eaten their gratin. I have to stop myself going to tell them off. This is a mother's restaurant after all.

Bompass & Parr

Blackcurrant jelly

The charming Bompas & Parr, who make art jellies for installations and parties (last week they did Mark Ronson's party) are here. They have brought some jellies in a cool box. Asking for a bowl of hot water to ease the jellies, elderflower and blackcurrant, out of their moulds, they serve them to each table as a 'palate clearer'.

Finally the chocolate mousses are served with a chocolate-dipped candied orange slice. A couple of people leave their orange slices. They are so good I scoop them off the plates and eat them up later.

Preparing for an Underground Restaurant

Mentally I started to prepare on Monday, planning my menu, visualising how many tables and chairs I would need.

Tuesday: I'd decided on my menu. Partly seasonal, based on what I get in my weekly organic box and partly just what I like to cook.

• olives
  
• fresh baked herb focaccia
  
• roasted cherry tomato soup

• Gratin dauphinoise with smoked salmon and double cream (without smoked salmon for vegetarians)
  
• Celeriac and carrot remoulade
  
• Green oak leaf salad with a Dijon mustard dressing

• Mousse au chocolat
  
• with candied orange slices.
  

Wednesday: Cleaning my flat, the toilet, floors, tossing out old magazines, stocking up on loo paper, asking my neighbour if I could borrow chairs. Basically I spent the day on my hands and knees with a bottle of bleach.

Went to buy a new battery for my digital camera which had stopped working. Had to trawl Oxford street. Time running out.

Evening went to Horton Jupiter's The Secret Ingredient home restaurant for the second time. Met Zoe Williams, Guardian writer, for dinner there. She is a new mother with an 18 month old toddler. We talked of our mum's cooking. Her mother was apparently a terrible cook but rather experimental...

"she put cardamom in everything" grimaced Zoe.

Zoe is also the restaurant reviewer for the Telegraph.

"What a fantastic job!" I said enviously.

"Well it can be difficult thinking up new ways to describe the same old dishes" she replied.

She also divulged that eating in Michelin starred restaurants was not that different in terms of actual food to ordinary non-starred restaurants. 

Made her promise to take me along with her if she ever needs a plus one for reviews. 

The Guardian photographer didn't turn up so I took the pictures. Lucky I had managed to find a new battery and charge up the camera.

Thursday: Got distracted chatting for 4 hours on facebook IM to a very witty and interesting man (and I've only ever seen a photo of his eye). Heart pounding at the end of the conversation. Romantic feelings for someone I have never met? 

Focus.

So ended up cooking at midnight. Made vegetable stock from celery, carrots, onions, coriander seeds, bay leaf, garlic, olive oil. Left to reduce down for several hours on the simmering plate of my Aga. Fresh stock makes such a difference to flavour.

Made some chocolate mousses with ras-el-hanout. Put them in fridge to set.

Prepared oranges for candied orange. Sliced oranges thinly. Laid them in a thick bottomed pan. One cup of water and 3 cups of sugar. Simmered gently for hours. 

Friday: checked chocolate mousses. Disgusting. 

This was such a successful combination for raw chocolates. For chocolate mousses it was awful. Had to chuck the lot.

Laid out candied oranges to dry on racks in coolest Aga oven. Tasted one. Delicious.

Spent morning on phone sending photographs to the Guardian of Horton Jupiter's restaurant. Dotmac email account suddenly not sending. 

Look at time.

Haven't done the shopping yet.

Rush out to Tesco's rather than trawling through farmer's markets which was original plan.

Spend £144 on food. £12 of which on an electric whisk as hand tired from last night's failed chocolate mousse whisking.

Drive to Community Foods in Brent Cross and buy catering tub of kalamata olives. £12.

Sister-woman agrees to come over and help move furniture.

Teenager arriving back from France on Eurostar. I'm late. I drive fast to St. Pancras. A bus collides with me as I overtake. Fuck it, I think. I check the damage later. Minor scrape. Who cares? It's London. Can't be precious about that.

Drive home with teenager. I'm too stressed to be nice to her. 

Sister-woman arrives.

She peels potatoes, tons of them. She then slices them thinly (but not thinly enough for me) and places them in cold water. I wish I had a robo-chef at home.

I remake chocolate mousses. They start to go wrong again. I've used 6 bars of chocolat Meunier. Lots of money. The chocolate mixture won't fold into the egg whites. 

At this point, dear readers, your normally bossy but calm chef has a total melt-down.

"I can't do it. IT'S ALL GOING WRONG. WHY AM I DOING THIS?' I  start to hyper-ventilate.

My sister starts to load the dishwasher.

"YOU ARE DOING THAT WRONG" I shout. She looks at me, clearly biting her tongue.

I try to breathe. I re stack the dishwasher. Sister-woman edges away from me.

 Teenager, who I haven't seen for a week, escapes to her bedroom with a glower.

"Mad woman" she hisses.

I've been trying not to drink. I've been trying to do this straight.

I nod at sister-woman and say "Make me a margarita cocktail."

I start to make the dough for my focaccia. I figure I'll make some beforehand to ferment it a little. Then add the fermented dough into the rest of the mixture later.

I make two large trays of focaccia. 

Sister-woman says "that's not enough".

I make two more trays.

I roast the cherry tomatoes and the garlic. They are out of season so they cost. 

I then remove the blackened skins which takes hours.

I mix the roasted tomatoes, squeeze out the roasted garlic, add it to my vegetable stock and whizz it up in the blender. It tastes amazing. Phew. Something is working.

I then check the candied orange slices. They are burnt. Black. I throw them in the bin. Trouble with an Aga is, it's so silent, you forget anything is in there.

I start again. Cooking them in sugar.

I am cooking until 3 am.

Saturday: 

I wake about 9am. 

Sister-woman and teenager want breakfast. This irritates me. I never eat when I cook. I am dimly aware that my irritation is totally unreasonable. Of course they have to eat.

Then sis and I drag tables from the garden and hose off the spider webs and dirt. Same for the garden chairs.

We move one of the sofas and my daughters drum kit into my bedroom. 

My bedroom, formally a romantic and sexy lair, looks like a car boot sale.

But, having placed the tables and chairs in the sitting room, I start to relax, even start to have fun.

Sister-woman and I lay the table cloths. She irons them, cleans the silver cutlery. It's starting to look like a French bistro. We giggle. We are playing 'houses' again as in childhood, but this time we play 'restaurants'. 

Finally a feeling of excited anticipation rather than dread.

The chocolate mousses are set. I send my teenager out to buy some more chocolate as we have two last minute guests and I don't have enough chocolate mousses.

She comes back with the wrong chocolate.

I shout at her "How can you be my child and not buy the right chocolate!?".

She mutters "I wish I'd never come home".

I start to make up the gratins. The potato slices have become weirdly stiff and curly. I can hardly lay them flat in the dishes. 

Another melt-down. I hate my sister for cutting them up last night. I scream at the slices of potato. 

I go into the living room. It looks lovely, all pale and candlelit with my black and white travel photos framed on the walls.

I return to the kitchen. 

The new orange slices are finally dried.

My sister goes home. I don't know if she will be back.

It's 5 p.m and I am still in my nightie. With trainers on from going into the garden. As my friend says "It's a strong look".

I make a supreme effort of self-control, knowing I still have the celeriac and carrots to grate (by hand) and the dressing to make. I go take a shower, wash my hair, put on a black dress. My one nod to glamour...high patent wedges and false eye-lashes. Under my big white apron.

I grate the two large celeriacs. They make such an enormous amount of salad, I know I will have enough for a week.

I wash the green lettuces. I ask my teenager to make the dressing. It's good. She uses the wrong mustard but it's good.

At 7.30 pm precisely the door bell goes.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kilburn-London/The-Underground-Restaurant/60298942936?ref=s

Nuit blanche

Soon after I met my daughter's father, I spent Christmas eve with his family in a self-built house in the Lyonnais countryside. His family was enormous; 9 brothers and sisters, their partners, their kids, his mum, uncles and aunts.

One family friend, an honorary 'ton-ton' (the only gay in the village)spent every family occasion singing the back catalogue of Claude Francois and Barbara (Sid'amour à mort) and displaying how he could thread cutlery through his nose. He discovered this hole in his septum by mistake when cleaning one nostril with a handkerchief and realising to his delight that the end poked out the other nostril. Ton-ton was also a devotee of 'finger dancing', enacting a passionate tango on the table with his hands. This song always reminds me of him:

I had no idea what to expect on this Christmas eve, never before having heard the expression 'nuit blanche'. *

We arrived about 9 pm which struck me as rather late. Crates of oysters were cracked open. I'd contributed two entire smoked salmon, one Irish, one Scottish.

At 11 pm we sat down for soup, an hour later, salad. In fact courses were served approximately every two hours for the entire night. I tried salsify for the first time, in a gratin, which I loved. I tried to keep up but in the early hours of the morning I must have fallen asleep. For I woke up, head in my plate, feeling remarkably refreshed, to see that the others were now tucking into a plate of venison.

"Venez les enfants, on mange Bambi!"

called uncles and brothers-in-law laughingly at the children who were still up, revving around the sitting room on their new tricycles and singing into their new karaoke machines.

Around 10 am, the meal finished with cognac and fruit, yoghurts tossed onto the table and teensy cups of expresso. I played with a cube of sugar, dipping it into my cognac, 'faire un canard' (make a duck).

Of course then, soon after, it was midday, and the French do not like to muck about with their meal-times.

"Lunch-time! à table!" went the call.

To my astonishment and, it must be said, admiration, people sat down and started eating again.

*White night, a French expression for staying up all night and going straight into the next day.

Belle mere

I've slept with several French men and while not entirely successful romantically it has been enormously useful for my cooking. To the point that, when serving French onion soup at Pogo café, feeling pleased with my efforts, I wanted to write on the menu board

"I've fucked a lot of French men and sat in their mother's kitchens to bring you this delicious soup"

just so's the customers would be fully aware of the personal sacrifices entailed. Perhaps all dishes should be accompanied not so much by a descriptive list of ingredients but also the memories and experiences involved in learning how to make them.

My best tricks have been learnt not at my mother's knee but observing French mamans at work in their kitchens. I even made a film of my 'belle mere' talking through how to make an aioli, the bowl teetering on the edge of the kitchen table as she whisked and croaked in her regional Lyonnais accent, virtually impenetrable.

Another time, after a rainy night, she took me mushroom picking. All I saw was the back of her stocky form weaving through the trees like E.T. She carefully hid, in that canny peasant way, which trees were her favourites. At the end she had a basket full of chanterelles, ceps and 'trompettes de mort' (small black chanterelles) while I had two unidentifiable mushrooms. 

She was poor. I remember the Christmas she spent 'freelancing' for a local farmer; two days with a heap of live chickens, twisting their necks casually, prior to plucking. But fairy tales do happen. After decades bringing up ten children on her own(1), for her husband had died early, she, in her mid-sixties, met and married a man, moving from her HLM (council flat) where she slept on a sofabed, to live in his chateau. 

(1) She got a medal from President Giscard d'Estaing for having a 'famille nombreuse' (big family). In those days, after the second world war, they rewarded women who did their bit to re-populate France. My 'belle mere' showed me the medallion, shrugging with her lips down-turned, "How did this medal help? I'd rather have had some money".

Relais Routier

Seeing Heston Blumenthal's makeover of The Little Chef restaurant, Popham, part of a British motorway caff chain, reminded me of the French equivalent, the Relais Routier or truck stop.

My parents had a house in France during my childhood, a stone cottage with 12th century walls three feet thick and a fireplace you could sit in. It was outside a small town named Condom, 100 km's south of Bordeaux in the Aquitaine region. 

It took us 2 days to drive there from London and the trip was always accompanied by a red plastic bound volume 'le guide des relais routiers de France'. The logo for relais routiers was a bit like a tube sign. It was also our job as kids in the back seat to spot these signs. The route to Condom was devised around which 'relais routier' we would eat in. Usually they were proper restaurants, cheap, a set menu, with a parking lot full of lorries. 

Sometimes, however, you would go into a private house, listed in this guide and eat in a woman's kitchen, just one table covered with an oilcloth. The woman would be wearing her flowery apron and cooking in front of you, turning around from her gas stove to plonk platters down on the table. This was the best food.

Once for hors d'oeuvres we were given a dish of long red radishes with their green tops still on, a basket of fresh baguette with a sourdough tang, a small hunk of unsalted butter and a pile of salt. We all looked at it, including my parents, not quite knowing what we were supposed to do with this array of ingredients.

The son of the woman, noticing our hesitation, laughed and showed us what to do: he cut a little cross in the end of the radish, smeared on a scrape of butter, then dipped it in salt, crunching the radish with torn off chunks of bread. So simple, just fresh produce, but so delicious. 

Wine was always included and everybody had a little carafe, even children, of rough red table wine. This impressed us kids enormously, we felt so grown-up.

In those days I ate meat. My favourite meal when we were allowed to order à la carte, was steak and chips. One night near Rouen, we stopped at a hotel-restaurant. We kids as usual ordered steak frites. There were strange mutterings from the proprietor, there seemed to be a problem. But then no, it was fine, steak frites it was. 

When the steak arrived, I bit into it.

"What do you think?" asked my dad.

"It's yummy. Sort of sweet."

"But you like it?" he asked, in a rare display of interest in my opinion

"Yeah, it's great." I enthused.

 At the end of the meal my dad told us that it was horse meat. 

Nerves

Preparing for Underground restaurant, hence lack of posting. 

Am slightly having kittens. Think I've forgotten how to cook even. 

Need to clean flat, do shopping, move tables and chairs into living room.

In fact, the most important qualification for running your home restaurant is either having enough chairs or, being on good enough terms with your neighbours to borrow them.