Beaut Commute

Tender

The Aubergine seduces. No other vegetable can offer flesh so soft, silken and tender. You don't so much chew an aubergine as let it dissolve on your tongue.I fell in love at first taste: baked till its flesh had almost melted, heavy with olive oil, musky with cinnamon and allspice, cumin and ginger, sweet with golden sultanas. 

The introduction to Nigel Slater's chapter on aubergines in Tender, page 39.

Nigel has been a friend and saviour to me for some time now. In times of sorrow, when others may turn to god, wine, self-help books or chocolate, I turn to Nigel. I have many of his books including Real Food, Appetite, Kitchen Diaries and now Tender. I don't even need to read them, I can just sit on the couch flicking through the images of dusky apples, fresh asparagus shoots, nutty roasted pumpkin, or plump raspberries. 

I turn to him for seasonal guidance and inspiration. I don't always follow the recipe but garner inspiration on how to put together ingredients. So a roast leg of lamb may be served with a cumin and chickpea mash rather than beans and spuds (which also have their place). 

My one, minor, gripe to date is the amount of meat and cream that he uses. But with Tender it would seem, Mr Slater has turned a corner. My favourite sentence so far is;

 "While still enjoying my crackling pork roasts and chargrilled lamb, my baked mackerel and crab salad, I have become more interested than ever in the effect of a diet higher in 'greens' than it is in meat - both in terms of my own wellbeing and, more recently, those implications that go beyond me and those for whom I cook."

After nearly two years spent with my Vegan love, vegetables have a new place in my heart. I consider meals around a vegetable rather than a piece of meat. A glossy purple aubergine will be seasoned with coriander seeds, cumin and baked in a fresh tomato sauce, kidney beans will go in with onion and garlic and some chilli for heat and be served with fresh coriander, an entrée may just be steamed asparagus shoots served with lemon and salt. My kitchen cupboards are never without tins of beans or chickpeas and packets of almonds or cashews.

Cookbooks hold escapism as well as a sense of hope and opportunity. Nigel Slater is on the money with understanding the whole sensory experience of cooking - handling the vegetables, the fragrant scent of cooking and the pleasure in seeing your loved ones eat. I think the reason why I turn to him when my life feels troubled is that I am reminded of the simplest joy in my life.

The lovely thing about taking a cookbook with you on the bus, train or tram is that you can plan the evening meal as you travel. What a nice way to transition out of your work day and into your evening. 

A2 and Ruth Quibell

Two recommendations for commuters in this post. First of all, newspapers. I get my news at the beginning of the day on the wireless (by which I mean radio and by radio I mean ABC National) and then by... wireless (by which I mean online news sites). But ach, I do like the crackle of the weekend paper. In fact, my weekend is often defined and paced by a weekend paper. And The Age does do a good, thick, satisfying Saturday paper. Sometimes I even save A2 (the arts and culture section) and Good Weekend magazine to read on the tram because the length of each story is just about tramride sized. 

So it was like getting extra lashings of ginger beer this weekend when I found the cover story of A2 was written by Ruth Quibell. Ruth is a sociologist who is interested in the pleasure that we get from the objects and 'things' in our lives. She is an intelligent, compelling and often touching writer. Her blog,Precious Things, focuses on why we are attached to objects not because of their status, but the stories behind them that make them important to us.

Guest Ross: An Oceanic Commute

It’s 07:30 and the Nautical Almanac says the tide turned a quarter of an hour ago, if I don’t catch the first of the ebb within 15 minutes my yacht will be stuck on the sand-bar that guards this estuary!

The seas are steep over the entrance, as the outgoing current meets the ocean swells, but I’m in the channel and it’s only a few minutes before the diesel’s switched off and the genoa is sheeted home.  The yacht heals over as it catches the gusty warm nor’wester that blows off Canterbury’s plains. “The wind on the Island” a poem by Naruda, is a sailors song to recite in the cockpit.

Wellington lies 165 sea miles to the north - a long way in a slow boat, 40 hours most likely. Not quite a commute in the normal sense, but I am going to work (managing a friends bookshop while he’s in the U.S.A.), and it’s how I like to travel, also my personal effects can come along for the voyage. With over 200 books on board it’s good to know I’ll not be lost for words.

Usually I have five or six titles on the go at any-time,  a bit like web-surfing before the web, some poems, a novel, bio’, history and a cookbook at least.

Set the self-steering, check the horizon and it’s time to refresh my memory of the various rocks and reefs that might sink an unwary sailor. The NZ Pilot flops open at the usual place, namely Cook Strait and I start to re-read the passages that warn mariners to take EXTREME CAUTION.

A fresh, chill, southerly blow should kick in behind this hot foehn wind, it’ll drive me through the Strait. At least I hope so, as the memories of bashing away the hours struggling into head-on northerly gales are not pleasant. One book I’ve got open is Reed’s “Treasury of Maori Folklore”, the pages on the Taniwha’s of Raukawa  (Cook Strait) are particularly interesting; one named Tuhirangi is apparently quite friendly. I’ll drink to him and Tangaroa and maybe the wind will be in my favour.

After the sea serpents some of James Boswell’s “London Journal” is good post meridian entertainment. He acquaints me with the bawdy sexual mores of 1760’s England. 2010 seems quite tame and discrete in comparison. But thank God (really Fleming) for penicillin!

So much to read so little time, after all there’s only 36 hours to go.

Captain Blacksmith is a husband, father, sailor, antiquarian book dealer and water colourist.

Wolf Hall

 “I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person."

Thomas Cromwell, son of a brutal blacksmith in England in the 1500s, through a lot of hard yakka manages to position himself as the right hand man firstly of Cardinal Worsley and then of the infamous King Henry VIII.

He is the main character of Hilary Mantel’s Booker winning Wolf Hall, and he is a cleverly chosen vehicle to provide a perspective of what went on behind the scenes during a period of this very interesting reign.

Thanks to the television series, The Tudors and historical novelists such as Philippa Gregory, a wider audience is perhaps now more familiar with the story of Henry VIII and Mantel’s book seems to assume its reader will have some understanding (or will resort to Wiki to get an overview). This means the pace and weight of the story can be more substantial than having to explain every character or event.

Cromwell’s position means that he is close to the King and Anne Boleyn and often acts as a messenger between the two. I like Wolf Hall because it’s like King Lear – it shows how fascinating and orchestrated politics is. Love, religion, family are smokescreens – this is really a story of strategy, risk and calculation.

Like The Lacuna, Wolf Hall is a big book, the sort you might think twice about lugging onto a tram. However, lug it people do because in the last month I have seen at least three other people reading it on Public Transport.  I imagine, like I did, they find it so gripping that leaving the house without it is not an option.