Hello! My name is Rebecca May Johnson, I am a writer and cook and this is my Substack. This week’s newsletter is about washing up, bad porridge and a better lunch. There are recipes for white asparagus with butter sauce and a beetroot salad-as-pattern and my eating notes from the week.
Hatred of Washing Up
I hate washing up. When Sam was ill, I washed up every two days. Dishes, cups, and pans built up to a great physical crescendo in the room, covering every surface in wonky piles until washing them took on the quality of a Herculean task. I find washing up so disturbing that I have to summon something like heroism to begin, and often allow dishes to accumulate in this way. Washing up reveals a quality in me that I find difficult – a tyrannical perfectionism that can prevent me from even beginning a task lest I not finish it immaculately. I find the chaos of dirty dishes overwhelming and I feel an intense urge to impose order on that which is before me. I rove around the house gathering everything in sight – collections of small bowls used for snacks, hoards of cups, water glasses in every room, and bring them all into the kitchen. I take every piece of cutlery I can find and add it to the washing up bowl, then cups, then plates, then large cooking dishes and chopping boards. If I am remotely feeble, the need and the simultaneous impossibility to somehow theorise the washing up pile almost breaks me. Nothing makes me madder than to think that I have completed it, only to find a forgotten teaspoon at the bottom of the bowl, or a cup that has escaped my eye. I often become very angry when I am washing up and scour my mind for resentments or slights to dwell on – and then realise that I am only furious because I am washing up. Music that I like to dance to, or an audio book sometimes take the edge off if I am jolly to begin with. What suits me about having a Lovecraftian mountain of dishes to wash up rather than a small pile, is that it is not possible to impose an order. Then, I have to accept the unknowability of what surrounds me and allow myself to be carried by the sea of dirty dishes; I give in and wash whatever comes to me first and keep going until it is all gone. In my efforts to rinse every item after I wash it with soap, my clothes and the floor always become very wet. When Sam sees me with a soaked top and sleeves and briefly wonders why, he soon realises I have been washing up. However, despite the torments I experience when standing at the sink I am grateful for the encounters that washing up brings about; the grimy, soap-sudsed mirror is also how I come to know my own terrible self.
Bad Porridge, Better Lunch
I made bad porridge using a brand of oats delivered with an online food shop that had been exchanged for the ones I ordered. Sam and I both have Covid so couldn’t go to the shop in person. Even as I was making the porridge I thought probably as with different flours, different oats might take a different quantity of water or time to cook, but I slept badly and wasn’t engaged with my task and did not check the consistency and add more water or give them longer. Instead, I looked at a few small black bits in the bubbling porridge and wondered how many insects generally get rolled in with the oats and fished out a couple of grain husks that had come to the surface. I poured it into bowls, noting with satisfaction that when I add milk, the porridge floats in the bowl like an island, bobbing gently. I took them upstairs on a tray with coffee to where Sam was reading in bed. I poured the coffee and began eating the porridge. After a minute I said, these oats aren’t really cooked, are they, chewing on a mouthful. Sam said no, he didn’t think he was going to finish them, sorry. I decided I did not want to eat any more either, and took away the bowls so we did not have to contemplate solidifying porridge. ‘I have an image of them continuing to expand in my stomach’, he said. I thought about that and considered the discomfort, hoping we would avoid it. Not long after that I brought up a plate with three halved toasted hot cross buns spread with butter and one bit each with Bonne Maman chocolate hazelnut spread for novelty. They were the supermarket’s ‘Best’ range, but we decided that the basic range hot cross buns tasted better.
I went to the allotment for herbs and had a look around. The shed, which I had righted with two friends a week ago, was still standing. The cicoria was coming back well where I had cut it back and I took some shoots with scissors to cook this week. I walked around the plot and took pictures of some bulbs returning from last year: scilla, a pale yellow species tulip, ranunculus, a few daffodils, and early wallflowers. Garlic has some good looking shoots. A few tiny buds forming on the little woody stump of a grape vine. A broccoli floret – I wondered if I should pick it or wait for it to get bigger – I left it for next time. There are a lot of self-seeded baby fennel bulbs that I will pick soon and braise in olive oil with lemon peel. Buds slowly forming on plum, apple, cheery and apricot trees. I picked chives, sweet cicely, parsley, and tarragon, all of which returned from last year. I pulled out a weed or two and stepped in puddles that had formed in the plastic covering patches of unworked ground and got very wet socks.
As an extravagant corrective to my breakfast flop, I opened a jar of white asparagus to eat with poached eggs at lunch time. I made a simple butter sauce with some sweet cicely and chives. It was elegant and sharp and very good – though if I had been able leave the house to buy expensive bread to have with it, would have been even better. It was the first time I had eaten white asparagus from a jar, and I loved it.
White Asparagus with Butter Sauce and Eggs
Ingredients
a jar of white asparagus, or a bunch of white asparagus, cooked until tender.
1-2 eggs each
3 tablespoons of white wine vinegar
80g cold butter, cubed
½ lemon
small bunch of soft fresh herbs – one or a mix of sweet cicely, chives, chervil, parsley,
quite finely chopped
salt and pepper
toast or bread to serve
How to make:
Put plates in the oven on a low temperature to warm. If (unlike me) you are using raw asparagus, cook it first in boiling salted water until properly tender, then drain and refresh in cold water to stop cooking, then drain well again.
Put on a pan of water to heat that can fit all of your poached eggs.* Wash, dry and chop the herbs. When the water’s boiling, reduce the heat to a simmer, so it’s barely bubbling, and crack an egg on the side of the pan and gently drop the egg in the water from close to the water’s surface. Repeat with all the eggs and cook for roughly 2 minutes – making sure the water doesn’t come back to the boil. To see if cooked, gently lift an egg out of the water with a spoon with holes in and see how wobbly it still is. When the white is set and yolks are still soft, remove the eggs to a warm plate or wooden board while you finish the sauce.
Meanwhile, in a small frying pan add the vinegar and a tablespoon of water a pinch of salt and a grind of white (or black) pepper and put on a medium-low heat. Reduce to a third of the volume, then turn off the heat and begin adding the cubes butter, whisking as they melt. When all the butter is melted, put the asparagus in with 2/3 of the fresh herbs, turn the heat on low again for a moment, and gently turn the asparagus in the butter with a squeeze of lemon, to taste.
To plate, put 4 asparagus spears on each plate with the egg on top and pour the remainder of the sauce over the egg, and then the remainder of the fresh herbs. Season the egg with salt and pepper. Serve with bread. Had I had some white wine at home, I would have had a glass with it.
*if you find it easier, make soft boiled eggs and peel them to serve on the plate.
Beetroot, Chicory, Walnut, and Goat’s Cheese Salad
Arranging the visual components of a salad is a satisfying form of play. The colours and forms allow me to visualise flavour. A synaesthetic game! Colour-flavour. I often forget to cook the beetroots when they arrive in the veg boxes I have variously received over the last couple of years. I did not eat any beetroot growing up as my father never really recovered from a childhood horror of pickled beetroot. In my early twenties, I cautiously tried beetroot with friends who were fans and found that I liked them. I read recently that they are better eaten on the day they are cooked – and I think I agree, that, anecdotally something is lost when they become fridge-cold.
Ingredients
5/6 smallish beetroots, washed
a few sprigs of thyme
a garlic clove
2 heads of chicory, or chicory and a mix of leaves
1 small (125g) goat’s cheese log cut into 1cm rounds
3-4 tablespoons of roughly chopped walnuts
Dressing
2 tablespoons, sour cream
1 heaped teaspoon, mustard
½ teaspoon, sugar
½ tablespoon, vinegar
1 tablespoon, olive oil
salt and pepper
How to make:
Preheat the oven to 200C (180C fan). Wrap up each small beetroot in a piece of foil with a slice of garlic, a sprig of thyme, salt and a drizzle of olive oil. I cut larger ones in half and then did the same. Cook until tender all the way through – it took mine around 50 minutes-1 hour. Allow to cool for a few minutes, then, using a small knife scrape and peel off their skin and trim any tough bits. Cut the beetroot into 1x1inch and allow to cool further.
While the beetroot cooks, toast the walnuts slowly, and make the dressing by mixing all ingredients together in a small bowl with a fork. Add the vinegar and salt to taste and put it on the table in its bowl with a spoon. Wash and dry the chicory leaves.
Carefully lay out the chicory in a fan-like shape in a serving bowl or on a large plate. Then add on the beetroot, placing each piece separately. (I did not want the beetroot to stain everything pink initially). Then arrange the slices of the goat’s cheese in a circle, and walnuts sprinkled on top. If I’d had chives, I would have added some of those, too.
Serve the salad ensuring a fair share of cheese and nuts and pass round the dressing.
Eaten with bread and butter.
Eating Notes
No outside eating notes this week as we both had covid and neither of us could leave the house.
While in bed this week I watched a slightly surreal anime series ‘Kotaro Lives Alone’ about a four year old boy who lives alone in an apartment block and the friends he makes. In one episode, he makes himself grand meals so that the plates can keep him company and stop him from feeling lonely. When he eats with his neighbours he only makes one large dish in the middle for them all to eat from, saying he no longer needs the plates to keep him company as he has friends instead.
Sam made a plate of crepes for us to share in bed with lemon and sugar, hazelnut chocolate and butter and sugar.
A cabbage, mashed potato and chopped sausage hash – breadcrumbed! – with a fried egg, ketchup and brown sauce. Made by Sam – delicious!
A snack of banana, tahini and honey on wholewheat pitta bread with roasted sesame seeds and sea salt on top.