Climbing Walls
Climbing Walls
Walking on walls, two recipes best served at room temperature or cooler, eating notes
Hello! My name is Rebecca May Johnson, I am a writer and cook and this is my Substack. This week’s newsletter is a diary entry about walking on walls, a conversation with a man on the allotment, recipes for gooseberry galette and flat beans in tomato sauce after Rachel Roddy, and eating notes.
If you’d like to pre-order my book SMALL FIRES, AN EPIC IN THE KITCHEN out 25th August with Pushkin Press, you can do so here (UK) and here (UK, US, & Europe).
Climbing Walls
I saw feet walking along the top of the brick wall through a few inches of open window in the bathroom. It was a surprising sight so I lifted the window further, whereupon I saw a boy extending his leg to step from the wall onto the mock slate roof over the single-story former washhouse. I suspected that the section of roof over which he proposed to climb was rather tender, with moss growing between the mock slates. Hearing movement the boy looked over, quite alarmed. ‘Probably better not to climb on the roof’, I said. ‘Oh, sorry’, he said. I didn’t want him to feel bad, so I said, ‘if you do want to get through in that direction, the door from the passage behind the wall to the street is not locked. You can go through there if you want, but it could be dangerous on the roof.’ I responded as if he might simply have needed better directions to avoid the roof, as if the purpose of walking along the top of the wall was simply to get from A to B – perhaps it was. It was a sunny morning and I could see across the maze of walls separating one yard from another, revealed as a low altitude climbing adventure.
I recognised the boy from almost three years ago, when he and his friend were playing on the allotment site, running round the paths behind the bramble hedges, hiding and climbing over things. They looked over at me quite a few times as they played, a little nervous. I said ‘hi’ and they said ‘hi’ and told me they were looking for lizards, as if I needed an explanation. I let them look around under the debris recently excavated from the earth on my plot – insulation panels, metal, breeze blocks, plastic sheeting. They didn’t find any lizards though, and I invited them to plant bulbs with me. Each boy dug a hole and planted a daffodil bulb, which, due to their small stature and the hardness of the earth, they found quite difficult. They couldn’t believe it would take six months for the bulb to re-appear above ground as a flower.
The boy on the wall was now taller and without his friend. I had not realised he was my neighbour – or maybe he wasn’t and had travelled across lots of back walls and washhouse roofs until I saw his feet. He said he did not need to go through the passageway with a door at the end and would return the other way. He turned to walk back along the wall, and I closed the window, leaving him to his own devices. I was glad that one of the other neighbours who shares the passageway did not see him.
Once we forgot our house key and Sam, who is much taller than me, climbed over the back wall to open the gate and let me in so we could climb into the house via the washhouse roof into a first-floor window. It was 8pm in August, still a little light, and we were not making any effort to be quiet or conceal what we were doing. Suddenly, I heard excitable but hushed talking from the house behind me across two floors, almost like the people inside were using walkie-talkies. Then loudly and with great force I heard: ‘Oi!’, from our neighbour whose voice I knew from when he spoke to his wife in the yard behind their house. I said, ‘we’ve forgotten our key!’ ‘Oh yeah, prove it!’, he said. It turned out that that day, without informing us or the other house whose back gate leads into the passageway, he had installed a surveillance camera looking into our shared space. Despite his desire to monitor his surroundings, he had failed to notice that we had been his neighbours for six months; he saw us first as criminals through his surveillance camera. Eventually and after some effort, we convinced him that we were not breaking into our house – we were his catch, he was reluctant to let us go – and he suggested we borrow a ladder instead of climbing the roof.
Gooseberry Galette and Braised Beans
Hesitant about what I would find at the allotment after being away, expecting the tomato plants have died. A horizon of ‘Parker’s variety’ yarrow has grown above the fence, a good decision to plant tall bright yellow flowers at the entrance, it takes the edge off the weeds. Barley-type grass dropping seeds about that I must remove, but tomatoes thriving despite no water since I planted them a month ago. Happily, also, bushes I put in two years ago are heavy with gooseberries, and this is the first time I have picked them. Hinnonmaki red and green Careless. Electric pale blue flowers on spires of cicoria gone to seed, six foot high and more. One neon red gladioli. A lime green and burgundy spider near the rhubarb chard which later changes colour when it stands next to green chard.
An old man from the other side of the site comes to the water tap and speaks to me and says he got a letter from the council about his plot. ‘It’s not a market, garden, it’s a hobby!’, he said. I said I had a lot of weeds to deal with after being away. He said, ‘you’ve done nothing wrong’, which made me feel good, then spoke in admiration about the artichoke plants, which are now flowering with a deep pile of bright purple at their centre. The same man had spoken to me about artichokes a few months before, when he asked me about growing them and eating them, said he’d never seen then on an allotment before. Then he told me he had found an artichoke in a shop and tried cooking it for the first time. I remember last time he’d told me before he hadn’t tried them. And now I see him again and he’s cooked one! He didn’t much like the taste though, and so much effort, too. Then he said, maybe it’s the way I cooked it. I said they can be prepared in different ways. When they are young they can be fried and that’s nice, I said. Then we more or less said goodbye.
With the gooseberries washed and dried and laid out on tea towels I decided to make a galette with the red ones. I wanted it to be very quick, so I went to Morrison’s and bought some Jus Roll pre-rolled puff pastry. The method to assemble the tart was based on the Chez Panisse apricot galette recipe from their Fruit book, which I have made several times and think is very good.
Gooseberry galette (serves 4-6)
Ingredients
350g gooseberries
1 x 320g sheet of puff pastry (I had jus rol ‘ready rolled’)
4 heaped tablespoons of ground almonds
2 tablespoons of soft brown sugar
2 tablespoons of demerara sugar
1 teaspoon powdered cinnamon
40g unsalted butter
How to make
Pre-heat the oven to 200C.
On a floured surface, roll out the pastry to 1/2cm thick square/rectangle (I rolled my pre-rolled pastry a little thinner than it came in the packet). Carefully put the pastry onto a metal baking sheet, or large oven tray or as I had, a large round iron dish and put it in the fridge. Meanwhile, in a bowl mix together 4 tablespoons of ground almonds, two tablespoons of soft brown sugar, two tablespoons of demerara sugar and 1 teaspoon of cinnamon (if you only have one type of sugar that’s fine too). Then in small saucepan, melt the butter and set aside. Remove the pastry from the fridge on its baking sheet, and in the middle of the pastry square, dump 2/3 of the almond sugar mixture and spread out until it comes to 1 inch from the sides. Then, put all the gooseberries on top, so they come to 1 inch from the sides too. Then, fold over the pastry from the edge so it covers 1 inch worth of gooseberries/almond mixture all around – so there’s some berries under the crust. Do this so it makes a rough circle. Then, brush the folded over pastry surface with the melted butter. Then sprinkle the rest of the almond sugar mixture over the pastry crust – this makes it really delicious! Bake in the bottom third of the oven for 30-40 minutes, or until golden brown on the crust. Slide onto a wire baking rack to cool – carefully, the fruit will be very hot! Serve with cream and/or ice cream.
Flat Beans and Tomatoes, with Feta, and Brown Rice (serves 2 with leftovers)
The galette was the dessert following a successful adaptation of Rachel Roddy’s flat beans in tomato made using tinned not fresh tomatoes with the quantities I had, and served with brown basmati rice.
Ingredients:
1 tin tomatoes
5 tablespoons olive oil
360g stringless flat green beans, top and tailed, and cut into 5cm segments
1 large mild onion, finely sliced
basil or parsley
Served with
200g feta cheese
1 cup of brown rice – I find the nuttiness a good foil for the sweet tomatoes
a small piece of butter
How to make:
Heat 4 tablespoons olive oil and add the onions with a pinch of salt. Cook on a low-medium heat for around ten minutes or until very soft but not browned. Add the cut up beans and stir, coating in the oil for 3-4 minutes. Add the tomatoes, breaking up any whole ones with a spoon. Simmer, half covered for roughly 40 minutes on a low-ish heat, or until the beans are very soft and the tomato is greatly reduced. The beans are not so much in sauce as much as coated in oily tomato sauce. Check the seasoning when cooked and add salt to taste and a grind of black pepper. Ideally, leave to rest for an hour at the least before serving. Tear in basil or add chopped parsley just before you eat it – at room temperature.
When you want to eat, cook the brown rice – in salted water from cold, until tender. Leave enough time for it to rest (5 minutes) covered, with a little butter before serving.
Eating Notes
Rice pudding and cinnamon ice cream with raspberry sorbet at Gelupo, the best I’ve had from there, both individually and as a combination. The rice pudding ice cream gives a mild backdrop against which the sorbet can shine. I couldn’t particularly taste the cinnamon but it didn’t matter. Superior to a disappointing fresh mint stracciatella ice cream I had at Gelupo, which was not a patch on most mint-choc-chip ice creams, and tasted like day-old mint tea. Eaten with my wonderful sister-in-law, Sarah who was visiting from the US, and Sam.
Fried chorizo slice, egg and avocado in a brioche bun at home for breakfast.
Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough ‘peace pop’, which if you can get past the awful name is a decent ice cream with cookie dough inside. Intriguingly the chocolate around the outside doesn’t ‘crack’ as such, but is somehow soft despite being very cold. This makes for less loss of chocolate shards as you eat it which is a good thing, but I did miss the crisp texture of cold chocolate. Eaten in Ipswich train station.
Campari and tonic, green olives and tortilla chips eaten while cooking the green beans and galette, when I felt so happy and like myself.
