First dinner party distracts from the unpacking

We're to that inevitable stage in a house move.  About 80 per cent of our stuff ... all the bits we really need ... is unpacked.  Then there's the 20 per cent we can live without, piled in boxes in a guest bedroom and the garage.  We had the best intention of continuing through the task.  But the kitchen called instead.

There were six of us around the table for our first dinner party at the new house.  And four others tucked about the house.  We'd been particularly brave and invited friends with children.  Two little ones went to bed upstairs with the starters.  Two older ones turned my office into a playroom.  All conveniently freeing their parents to enjoy themselves.

We started with champagne while picking at quartered figs with prosciutto and honey and tortilla chips served with corn and avocado salsa.  Yes, an unusual combo, but this was supposed to be a casual, simple supper and the produce in the fridge dictated the nibbles.  Just as I suspected, the kitchen island with the double doors behind spilling into the dining room is perfect for entertaining.  I can be cooking at one side of the island while guests talk and graze from the other.

The nibbles might have been simple but the starter sure wasn't.  Once we settled down at the table, Piers presented his smoked salmon mousse with freshly baked rye rolls.  A towering success, I thought.  Rich, smooth and silky fish spread over still warm bread, flavour picked up by the rye flour and a bit of caraway.  Poor Piers had spent 40 minutes pushing the mousse through a fine strainer to get the light consistency, wearing a blister on his thumb in the process.  We really need to buy a food mill.  The fact that we'd broken out a bottle of our Patrick Jevillier meursault from our wedding gift cache helped things along.

The oven was doing the hard work with the pork shoulder, thankfully.  Eight hours slow cooking.  It was tasty, though in the excitement of the guests we forgot to add the white wine or to make the sauce. Unsurprisingly, it was a bit dry.  We ate it as leftovers two nights later, with the sauce, and it was actually much better.  (Hush.  Don't tell our guests.)  On the night itself, some buttery mashed potatoes and spinach added moisture.

I defaulted to one of my simple standbys for dessert:  key lime pie.  No key lime juice here in England, of course, so I use about 20 per cent lemon juice to the remainder lime.  Top with white chocolate shavings and smile.

The sharp, citric pie is light enough to leave room for a cheese board. Essential at the Bencard household.  I do miss our Sainsbury's cheese counter; neither Tesco or M&S, the options at this end of town, have the selection.  M&S' cheese counter got me through, but with fairly traditional selections.  (Mature cheddar, goat, camembert, emmental.)  Must remember to plan a trip across town or special order for more unusual stuff next time.

One consequence of having parental types around the table, with kids in the house, is that the drinking is relatively modest and the departures are early.  We were tucked up in bed by 1am, exhausted but happy.  A good start to what we hope is a long and legendary tradition of dining chez Bencard.

Calm contentment comes from cooking and decorating

A weekend of food, wine and home decorating.  Bliss.  If only I could win the lottery and devote my life to becoming the British Martha Stewart.  Alas, I'll just have to keep these excursions to my days off.

We started things back at Newlyns, where we were cashing in the last of the vouchers given to us as wedding presents.  My aunt BJ's cooking school certificates turned into places for both of us on the new "Pork and Poultry Perfection" course.  Just one other student joined us, so the ratio to Newlyn's staff was 1-to-1, a real treat.

As with the butchery course we took earlier in the year, we spent the day with master butcher Jason, who greeted us cheerfully as he casually strolled up the stairs with half a pig's carcass over one very broad shoulder. As before, he started by breaking down the animal, showing us where cuts of meat come from and how they're taken out of the body.  I'd already forgotten plenty from the earlier course, so this was a good reminder.  Over to us for a practical exercise, we trimmed a pork loin, made fig and sausage stuffing and prepped it for roasting; it became our lunch several hours later.

Next, on to pork pies.  Not my favourite thing.  The gelatin always puts me off.  But good to know what goes into their making.  In fact, my respect has increased for this dish, which I'd seen as humble but I now know is quite complicated.  Shaping the pastry properly is a challenge. (And we didn't even have to make it.  Head chef Hannah had done that bit in advance.)  As with ravioli, there's an art to getting the right amount of filling.  The top needs to be beautifully yet solidly crimped.  If you've done it all properly you have about two minutes to get them out of the moulds before they stick.  (Four of my six made it.)  Finally, if the crusts are whole, you have to squirt in that gelatine to solidify everything and help with the preservation.  Probably the first and last time I bother.

An equal amount of bother but possibly worth another go is sausage making.  We ended the day with this.  Getting the right flow of meat into the casing obvioulsy takes practice, as does the looping and twisting required to turn the long link into individual sausages.  Will a Kitchen Aid sausage grinder make an appearance on the Christmas list?

On the poultry front, Jason reminded us how to quickly and neatly segment a whole chicken.  We learned how to spatchcock (a simple technique I really must remember for barbecues), tunnel boned and stuffed a thigh, and prepped breasts with a spicy marinade.  The best thing about Newlyns' courses is how much they send you home with.  We left with sacks of the aforementioned treats bound for our freezer.

The next day I was off to Decorex, the top annual trade show for the interior design industry.  My entry was thanks to my mother in law, who's in the business, and my objective was to look for fabrics for the new house.  I was like a kid in a candy shop.  Admittedly, the kid who only likes the expensive stuff.  I liked lots.  But what did I really love?  Hand painted Chinese wallpaper panels.  Birds nesting in tree branches with hints of bronze and gold.  The rough cost to do our bedroom, with the trade discount?  About £6,000.  Even the allure of sleeping within by the same designs that ensconced the 18th century nobility was not enough to tempt me towards that price tag.

Instead I identified a lovely mix of fabrics from one of my mother in law's favourite companies, Linwood.  Stripes with a bit of botanical for the bedroom, mixed with other stripes, gives me my desired blue and green and verges on floral without being too feminine for my husband.  But the complimentary big, bold flowery fabric works for our adjoining dressing room, with a couple of pillows for the bed.  The outrageously expensive Pierre Frey showroom was crammed with fabrics that left me panting with desire, little of it practical.  I did, however, find a gorgeous African print for a Roman blind in our soon-to-be honeymoon-themed guest bathroom.  It's a small window, so I can justify the silly per-meter cost.  Even more practical, I found a vendor of the old fashioned, multi-prong "opera hooks" we wanted for coats in the back hall.

So much more fun than work!  But it's time to get back to the grindstone to earn some cash.  Practical or not, even opera hooks don't come cheap.

L'Ortolan, shotguns, rivers and roses combine for birthday and anniversary fun

The planning paid off.

Early last year, when we looked at possible dates for our wedding anniversary, my birthday popped out on top.  He was less likely to forget either if they were linked, went the joke.  More seriously, I thought that bringing them together gave us an excuse for bigger festivities.  Exciting weekends and celebratory trips.  A year on, and the combo of first anniversary and 40-somethingth birthday validates my choice.

We started out at our local Michelin star restaurant (10 miles up the road, just outside Reading).  We'd been impressed by L'Ortolan on our first visit earlier in the year and wanted to give it another go.  But, clearly, the price tag necessitated a special event.

We discovered a second dining room, in a conservatory off the main one.  I'd found the look of the place a bit boring in January, but this room is lovely, with fairy lights behind gauzy curtains in the glass ceiling and a view to the garden beyond.  Make a point of requesting seating here.  The eight-course gourmand menu with matching wine flight was a necessity, of course.

All was up to expectation.  Exquisite flavours, beautifully balanced and artistically presented.  Highlights included the innovative beetroot meringue and the horseradish ice cream that went with grilled mackerel (though we thought we needed a bit more fish); melt-in-your-mouth lamb with the poshest grilled sweetcorn I've ever seen; and a combo of lemon curd, crispy meringue, raspberry sorbet and pickled raspberries that made me forget my normal opinion that chocolate is required for a proper dessert.  While the style is generally traditional European there are takes from other cultures, like that corn (hints of American BBQ) and a fish course of brill with crispy chicken wing, curried lentils, coconut and pickles that had clear roots in Asia.  The wine flight offered numerous memorable tastes (we're still waiting for them to email us the list) and was unusually generous; a very full glass with each course, poured by a gregarious and informative sommelier, for an additional £40.

Mid-meal an enormous bouquet turned up at the table.  My wonderful husband had sent a photo of my bridal bouquet to the local florists, who used it for inspiration, picking up the scabious, lilies and roses I'd carried down the aisle.  A fine indication of the pleasures to come, as he'd done the planning for the weekend.

The next morning we were booked at the Spitfire Shoot for an hour's lesson.  The weather was exquisite, making the 40-minute drive deeper into Hampshire a joy in itself.  Blue skies, undulating hills  zig-zagged by lines of vivid green trees, the rich gold of just-harvested fields dotted with piles of hay bales.  The shoot ... the equivalent of a golf driving range for shotgun-wielders ... sits in a deep valley.  A path winds down its centre, with offshoots to different hides branching off it.  Targets at each stand mimic a different kind of animal movement.  Here, a pheasant being driven towards you.  There, a startled bird flying away.   Next, rabbits fleeing across a chalk escarpment.  Not real animals, of course, but clays fired out of machines.  All to help you practice for the real hunting.  I fear that I'm unlikely to bring home dinner any time soon with my own gun, but this outing suggested I'd have most luck bagging a bunny.  Pigeons, evidently, will be quite safe from my aim.  Piers, true to his military heritage, blew things to dust at all stands.

On to Mottisfont Abbey for a late morning walk.  This National Trust property features a lovely brick and stone mansion sitting behind a deep lawn along the River Test.  It's best known, however, for the walled garden on the hill above the house, and most particularly for its roses.  May and June, therefore, are its best months, but many of the roses were in a secondary autumnal blooming, clematis and penstemons were out and the buddleias were covered with butterflies.

The pleasing ramble worked up an appetite for lunch, which took place further up the Test at the Mayfly pub.  Its long riverside garden is its best feature.  The food and drink aren't worth going out of your way for, but the view certainly is.  We sat in warm sunshine, watching the light sparkle off the racing water as ducks and swans glided by and the bullrushes danced on the far shore.  Datchet, out for the day with us, was entranced.  But no amount of pulling at his lead was going to get those birds any closer.

Back home, I had indulgent time to make myself my own birthday cake (chocolate, iced with white chocolate ganache) and retreat to a hot bath laced with oils of violet and honeysuckle, a glass of champagne in hand and the latest issue of Country Life for entertainment.  Piers whipped up dinner (spinach, bacon and nectarine salad) from the pork-focused cookbook I'd given him for our anniversary.

Memorable, indulgent, variety-strewn and calming.  A combined celebration of another year of life and the joy of being together.  And, frankly, a glass raised to our hopes for the next year.  Cancer, job changes and the trials of selling and buying houses made the first 12 months of marriage less of an easy ride than it was supposed to be.  Here's to an extended honeymoon through year two.  We deserve it.

Paralympics remind us to banish "I can't" from the vocabulary

Most of the world's eyes turned away from London as the Olympic torch guttered out.  But the party wasn't over.  After a couple of weeks to catch out breath and refit some stadiums, it started all over again for the Paralympics.  They're coming home to the place where they were invented, originally as a rehab tactic for paraplegic soldiers from WWII.  Still riding on a giddy high from the first games, the welcome has been cheerful and enthusiastic.

The media tells us it's the biggest and most successful version of these games ever.  Everything was sold out, just like the main Olympics, and they were covered daily in prime time TV.  (Although on Channel 4 rather than the BBC.)

With just 48 hours to go 'til the closing ceremonies and the end of our magnificent summer of sport, I was lucky enough to get an invitation to the swimming final.  (Thank you, Cisco!)  Though I'd gotten to three Olympic sports, none of them were as jaw dropping and inspiring and this event.

We watched severely disabled people come out of the dressing rooms.  Blind people led by their guides.  Those with withered legs, or none at all, wheeled to the edge of the pool.  People with withered arms, or none at all, striding with poise and shrugging out of their dressing gowns.  Some had terrific scars.  Whether from injuries that created their disability, or from surgery to repair birth defects, who knew?  And, frankly, it didn't matter.   Because the minute these people slipped into the pool to compete, you forgot everything that was wrong with them, and dropped your jaw at all that was right.

They all cut through the water with the same grace and speed as their able-bodied colleagues, leaving a spray of water in their wake as they cut down the pool with impressive speed.  Turn your eye away from the disabled part and you see a beautiful body, ruthlessly trained and finely honed.  An object of beauty, not to be pitied, but to be admired.

Of course, you can't forget the disability for long.  Because that's what makes this all the more impressive.  Backstokers without arms who get into the start position by bracing themselves on a towel held in their teeth.  The freestyler with no arms who streaked down the whole length of the pool without ever taking a breath, using her legs to create an undulating kick that turned her into a dolphin.  The blind swimmers who charge ahead and know to turn because their coaches knock them with a ball as they come up to the turn.

Even those of us who try to be open minded usually look at the disabled with pity.  It was a healthy thing for the whole nation to spend two weeks looking at these people with admiration. 

It was also an exciting opportunity to get into the main Olympic park.  As we saw on TV, the architecture is grand, the gardens are lovely and the crowd control is efficient.  Lord knows they needed the latter, as we were carried along with the thousands.  The inside of the swimming venue was gorgeous; cleverly designed with high "wings" of spectator stands that will be dismantled after the games, leaving a more manageable building.  The concourse around the main stadium had a distinctly Disney feel about it, with helpful volunteers making jokes as they steered the crowd, coloured lights playing across the buildings and the crazy sculpture of The Orbit looming above us.

And I had a very Disney feeling inside as I left. I remember as a kid being close to tears on the last night of a Walt Disney World holiday, taking that boat back to the car park from the Magic Kingdom, knowing it was all over and not knowing when, or if, anything so wonderful would ever happen to me again.  It was the same as we left the Olympic park at our backs.  Seven years of preparation.  Six weeks of once-in-a-lifetime.   For us, it was all over.  In less than two days, London would return to normal.

Thanks to the Paralympians, however, some of us will never go back to the way we were.  At least, I hope we don't.  Because after watching 11 days of human spirit and sheer determination triumphing over adversity, it's hard to look at the problems in your life in the same way.  Buck up and work for what you want, because no problem is insurmountable.  If a bit of that inspiration stays with the British public, the Paralympic legacy may be far greater than that of the "real" games.

Goodbye, summer. Voice from the past still rings true

Deep in the middle of unpacking, I came across two yellowed pages of newsprint, kept since the summer of 1981.  It's a column I wrote during the cherub programme, a summer school run at Northwestern University for kids between their junior and senior years of high school.  The Medill journalism programme director, George Harmon, chose to read this aloud at our closing ceremonies.

It was one of the proudest moments of my youth.  Which is why, no doubt, I've kept these pages through all the moves of the past thirty years.  Here's the column:

August.

One more month of real warmth in the midwestern sun.  One more month of fests and celebration.  One more month 'til school.  Looking around, I'm thinking I ought to prepare myself for some tearful goodbyes.

Free time.  Sleep until noon and party to the wee hours of the morning.  Soap operas.  Game shows.  Love Boat reruns.  Hours of purposeless talk on the telephone.  Sitting still just to feel the air conditioning rush over hot skin.  Hopping in the car to go for a country drive.  Shopping.

Vacations.  The ocean.  The mountains.  Anywhere far enough away from home to make it different.  The excitement of exploring a strange city.  The peace of dawn in a beach town.  Disneyland.  Suitcases.  Airplanes, busses, cars and feet.  Packing to go home.  Tears.

The sights.  People watching,  Caravans of kids on bicycles.  A few million different shades of green.  Flowers.  Roller skates in the park.  Convertibles.  The ice cream man, watermelon and a barbecue pit.  Lawn mowers, car washers and sun bathers.

The preparation.  Back to school sales.  New notebooks, unsharpened pencils, pens that still have caps. New clothes.  Coats tumble out of storage, shorts tumble in.  Hello sweaters, dusk before dinner and homework.

Feet are dragging.  Brakes are screeching.  None help stop August's mad rush towards September.  The older the month, the faster the speed.  

Pick up your feet.  Don't try to stop the race, just settle back and enjoy the ride.

Pausing from house move madness, it's time for Macbeth

A week later than planned, I got my lovely evening of communal entertainment on the grass.  Not the Olympic closing ceremonies, nor the Blur concert, but a six-man production of Macbeth on a basic stage set up on the lawns of The Vyne.  It was magnificent.

I’ve never enjoyed Macbeth more.  Part of this, I confess, is that we were watching a tightly edited version that came in at exactly two hours.  All the famous bits remained, but much detail and back story had been trimmed to keep things moving.  After all, as one of the actors said to us afterwards, most scholars now think the plays are so long, and have so much repetition, because the original audiences wandered in and out.  Shakespeare couldn’t have imagined an audience sitting in rapt silence, giving complete attention.  When that’s what you’ve got, why not trim the play for a more straightforward delivery?  The result, in this case, was a fast-paced drama with the feel of a modern action thriller.  No time to get bored and, more importantly, not enough time for the effects of sitting on the ground to seep into your bones.

Although, if you have to sit on the ground, this is a damned fine place to do it.  The Vyne is our local National Trust property, just two miles from our new place.  (For an earlier post about the house, click here.)  Its Tudor, red brick heart is graced with a classical portico of white stone, the first ever put on a private home in England.  This formal façade looks out over the North Lawn, which stretches down to the river, and beyond that, pasture and woodland.  The actors built their stage … a simple wooden platform with a castle tower as a backdrop … at the bottom of the lawn, just before the river.  It was a gorgeous setting, although the actors’ concentration was challenged by two flocks of wild geese landing with a chorus of honks, and various other waterfowl chattering in the twilight. 

Birds or not, we certainly had no problem with sound.  Though we arrived late, we discovered that the first third of the lawn was reserved for people who only had blankets.  (Further back, lawn chairs and folding tables proliferated.)  Thus we ended up 10 feet from the stage, able to hear every word and see every expression.

This rough and ready style is probably a lot closer to the way these plays were originally performed.  (Except for the aforementioned editing, of course.)  Outside of places like The Globe, Elizabethan and Jacobean companies often set up in courtyards of coaching inns, or great halls of noble homes.  A small band of men played all the parts, including the female ones.  They made no attempt to be convincingly female, besides the dresses.  But, let’s face it, if a man’s going to have an easy time with any of Shakespeare’s women, it’s going to be with Lady Macbeth.  We all know who wore the breeches in that relationship.

The acting style was a bit over-the-top, at times excessively dramatic.  But, like the stage and the setting, it added a flavour of authenticity.  When you’re belting it out to people at the back of the lawn, it’s all about big voices and big movements.  We probably noticed it more because we were the equivalent of the groundlings, a stone’s throw from the action.

Groundlings stretched on tartan with a picnic hamper full of Marks and Spencer goodies and bottles of Australian chardonnay.  There, I suspect, a rather vast improvement on our theatre-going forebears.

When it was all over, our multi-functional acting troupe switched hose and doublet for shorts and tee shirts and disassembled their own stage, while chatting to us about their interpretation.  We had been impressed, then we were charmed.  No question about it, we’ve discovered another “must” for the summer social diary.

At last, it's ours. Roots sink deep with the marital home.

At 10:30 yesterday, we got the call.  Monies had transferred, legal papers were all official.  Without leaving our desks, we had become homeowners.

It wasn't so much joy as contentment that washed over me.

I am a nest builder.  This was obvious even as a young woman when, forced by sorority house tradition to move rooms every quarter, I'd need to make sure my new room was completely decorated before move day ended.  Moving in with my boyfriend was one of the happiest, and most monumental, decisions of my life.  In the two years that have followed I've revelled in a wonderful relationship.  But I have hated living in temporary, rented accommodation.  Unable to put things on the wall, no point in decorating, no sense cultivating the garden.  A whole home life lived in temporary expectation, like a plant confined, root bound, to a pot, when it really should be in the ground.

And now, home.  Not just any home.  The marital home.  Chosen carefully, with every expectation of establishing ourselves there until the downsizing of our advanced years.  A home big enough to fit all our stuff.  A blank canvas with magnificent decorative possibilities.  A walled garden with enough room to challenge me, but not so much space as to make me a slave to horticulture.

Unexpectedly, a modern home.  For all my determination to end up in a picturesque village property, reality won out.  I've learned my lesson from the constant worries and maintenance of the 200-year-old cottage I lived in when I met Piers.  I've had enough of old world charm, and am rushing headlong towards the delights of high-tech insulation, windows that tip in for cleaning and every room pre-wired for television and ethernet.

In the value-for-money stakes, there was no contest.  We're getting more square footage, for less money, than any comparable property we viewed.  The floor plan is beautifully designed, with lovely touches like glass in the doors between rooms, to allow you to contain the heat while letting light flow through, or the granite kitchen counters with the power strip that pops out of a hidden hatch on the island.  It spreads over three stories; one of the spare bedrooms provides a roomy "man cave" for Piers. And for me, an office over the garage, so home working becomes a bit more formal and it's easier to separate the job from life.

The garden is surrounded by high brick walls in the same pale yellow as the house.  Just a swathe of grass now, I'll spend all winter sketching plans for what it might become.  Around the patio and the front of the house are beds ready for planting.  And plant, I have already done.

Pot bound roots isn't just an analogy for me.  I have a platoon of pots I've carried with me from Thames Cottage, nursing them in anticipation of a real garden.  In they went this afternoon.  Released from captivity, allowed to sink roots deep.  (If they can get through the thick clay I've discovered forms the basis of my land. I have a lot of soil improvement to do.)  One plant was more important than all the others.  A medium-sized hosta, light green leaves.  An unexceptional plant to look at.  But my own family roots are bound up in it.

My grandfather grew the ancestor of this plant in his garden in Bellerive Acres, a neighbourhood in suburban St. Louis, in the '50s.  When they sold that family home, my mother dug up sprigs of the host to take to their retirement house, and to plant at our place.  For 40 years, that hosta lined the walk to our front door.  When I left the house for the last time, I scattered some of my mother's ashes in her garden, then I dug up a sprig of that hosta, wrapped it carefully, put it in my luggage and brought it back to England.  I've been nursing it in a pot ever since, waiting for today.

And now, spade in hand, I'm digging in my soil, in my garden, planting my ancestral hosta, outside my house, shared with my husband.  At last, I am truly home.