Scones in Wetherspoons
Things I didn’t understand or which annoyed me on Friday, some scones, and eating notes
Hello! My name is Rebecca May Johnson, I am a writer and cook and this is my Substack. This newsletter is about some things that I didn’t understand or which annoyed me on Friday, scones, and lots of eating notes.
Scones in Wetherspoons
I had a notion to make cheese scones to bring on an afternoon walk with the one ‘mum friend’ I made at the library baby group and someone else I know who just moved to her village; I set up the walk to introduce them. I thought they would get along.
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In the morning, I took the baby out for a walk to see if she would nap a little early, before her swimming lesson. She nodded off briefly, but when I got involved in a search for a lost dog, she woke up. From a distance I saw the woman who volunteers to organise the cinema volunteers, including me (I have yet to return since having the baby.) She was with a man I couldn’t quite see and who I assumed was her husband. She ran towards me and asked me if I had seen a black sausage dog, I hadn’t. A few minutes later as I was walking past the Thai restaurant which is closed for renovations until spring, listening to a New York Times podcast about Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel (they didn’t like the ending), I heard someone call out faintly have you lost a dog? I turned around and saw a builder. I said I hadn’t, but I knew who was looking for it, and phoned the cinema volunteer organiser. The dog trotted out of the restaurant and the builder petted him and picked him up. The restaurant owner also stepped out to ask about it, I said who was looking for it, he also knew her, said he was meant to see her last night at the cinema, but hadn’t. I was confused by the appearance of the sausage dog, which was black and glossy: the cinema volunteer organiser is usually out with a blonde-ish dog. I wondered if she had a new dog, if it was one of her daughters’ dogs, or if she had always had another dog I hadn’t somehow known about? I chatted to the builder who found the dog while we waited for her to arrive. I said he must be confident with dogs to have picked up one he didn’t know. I could hear the voice of the cinema volunteer organiser coming round the corner. It wasn’t her dog after all, she was advocating for a man who had lost his dog, leading the search. He followed behind.
Then I took the baby to a swimming lesson. On the way I anticipated the issue with cubicles that I experienced last time we came to the pool. There are a handful of cubicles with special tables on which to change a baby into or out of swimming clothes. People have taken to ‘reserving’ these cubicles by leaving their clothes, shoes and bags inside while they swim. Finding none were free, last week, I changed the baby on a narrow bench and fed her snacks to distract her from the discomfort of the situation as I extracted her from a wet costume. When I asked the receptionist what to do about this on our way out, she told me to move the other families’ stuff to the side and simply use the baby cubicle. But the idea of a stand-off with soggy adults and children trying to kick me and the soggy baby out of the cubicle they had marked out as theirs made me feel nervous.
After today’s swimming lesson ended, I did a tour of the changing rooms with the soggy baby in my arms and saw that all the baby cubicles had stuff left in them again. Holding on to the receptionist’s words, I went into a cubicle with a baby table where people had left their clothes and shoes. I did not move their stuff or even touch it; I put our bags on the floor and changed the baby on the table which made things considerably easier than last week. I rushed and did not moisturise the baby because I was worrying the people would come in from the pool to claim the space. There was a puddle on the floor where I stood to change the baby; I imagined the people seeing the puddle after we left and realising what had happened. When I put her down to get changed myself, she picked up a croc belonging to another child and began chewing it. I tried to prevent her doing this while dressing without taking the time to, for example, dry myself, etc.
After swimming we went to the supermarket to buy cheese and milk for the scones and I thought that as I had a pound coin, I would try the trolley with a child seat again having failed to figure it out last time, when the baby simply stood on the seat, and I couldn’t see where to put her legs. I failed again, as her legs were splayed uncomfortably wide to get her into the seat and she looked unhappy, so I carried her while pushing the trolley round and taking things from the shelves with my free arm. It was only when I had finished the shop that I saw I’d had her facing the wrong way and that her legs should be the opposite side, facing me. I turned her around and she looked very happy about being in the seat, and I lamented the shop was already over.
When we got home, I put a frozen homemade cottage pie in the oven for the baby and took out the weighing scales and my ingredients. Two types of cheese (red Leicester and cheddar) and chives, butter, baking power, eggs, milk, flour, etc. Sam would feed the baby lunch while I made the scones. I went to get the new bag flour out of the drawer and there was flour everywhere and chewed bits of paper. A rat had visited overnight! A pest man from the council had only visited yesterday to put down traps; evidently, the rat had not been caught. I threw the ratty flour in the bin and went out again to a smaller shop and bought another bag of flour and then made the cheese scones.
My friends got off the train, I told them about the rat and the new flour – though my mum friend, A, said I shouldn’t have mentioned the ratty flour and they’d never have known – part of why I like her so much – and we walked round the sea front in the sun which we had not seen for a while, and the ferocious wind which numbed my forehead, and left a voicemail for another friend to meet us in Wetherspoons for a hot chocolate. We took a detour to the charity shop where the others bought a top, some baby books and bedsheets, then ate the cheese scones in Wetherspoons and drank coffee while the babies crawled around the carpeted floor and also ate cheese scones.
I first began going here with A after library baby group. It’s opposite the library, and before the library closed for renovations, A used to come and sketch people there after the baby group. After we’d spoken a few times in the library she invited me to join her, which was very exciting.
On Friday afternoon it was full of people having lunch with their children and no staff members were bothered that we ate cheese scones out of brown paper bags that I’d brought in. There isn’t anywhere else in the town that is large enough for multiple prams and with easily accessible baby changing facilities. The coffee is so cheap and room is so vast that the bar is quite distant from where we were sitting – this branch of Wetherspoons effectively functions as a community centre. As we were leaving, we saw a rack of self-published Wetherspoons magazines, with the foremost headline saying: ‘Does Truth Matter? Many untrue statements were made about Wetherspoon during the pandemic. Wetherspoon News sets the record straight’. My friend J informs me Wetherspoons chiefly use their in-house publication to settle scores.
Eating notes
I made the cheese and chive scones to Felicity Cloake’s recipe in the Guardian. The next day we had them warmed up and buttered with fried eggs and ketchup and a cup of black coffee, very very good.
Twice in the last few weeks I have had soft goat’s cheese on buttered toast with sliced cooked beetroot from a packet and dill on top for lunch. The second time I made it I added pul biber on top. I ate it with peach iced tea made from a syrup from a French supermarket – that contains actual sugar. I bought a bottle of the syrup as all peach iced tea in the UK that is easily available has artificial sweeteners in it now, which I hate.
I went on my own for a very quick meal sitting on a bar stool at St John before my friend Mike’s book launch (just started reading and enjoying very much!). Brown crab meat on toast with half a lemon; a green salad dressed very well; a glass of light red wine; blood orange posset with a ginger biscuit. All excellent, apart from the toast underneath the crab which had been made some time ago and which was cold and tough. But pouring single cream into a posset is a revelation I shall be copying: how could it need more cream? you wonder at first, and yet..!
I have made three recipes from Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course in the past week or so and have found them easy to follow:
A leek and potato soup: far less potato in than I thought! I suppose the silkiness comes from that. Pleased to have had chives and cream at home to finish it off. Much, much less stodgy than Angela Carter’s version.
A goulash, which I wanted to make after reading Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, which features goulash many times. With brown basmati rice, pickles, sour cream and dill.
An apple and almond pudding which I made when I heard my partner’s train was delayed – very easy! Some cooked bramley apples on the bottom and a quick batter made with ground almonds (and no flour) on top and then baked. We had it with vanilla ice cream.
On a day when our mood was low I made Sam’s grandfather’s chocolate sauce to have on vanilla ice cream with toasted chopped hazelnuts on top. He emailed me the recipe about a year ago and it’s a diamond in my inbox.
Eating notes for a baby
Some meals we have made for Ursula recently
Meera Sodha’s daily dal served to Ursula with yogurt and grated cheese. (We also ate this without the cheese.)
Using a fork I mashed a third of a tin of butter beans with a tablespoon of tuna, the same of tinned sweetcorn, some snipped spring onion greens and coriander, an egg, and a spoon of flour. I mixed it all up, then dropped dessert spoons of it into a hot pan with olive oil and fried on each side. I put the fritters in front of Ursula with thick yogurt. She ate it.
For a lunch at home and a packed lunch the next day at nursery, I softened ½ a sliced red onion in olive oil, added a sliced clove of garlic, and fried a bit more, then added a few glugs of passata and simmered for a couple of minutes. Then I added in a few spoons of butterbeans. I mixed this with cooked pasta and divided half for lunch on one day at home with grated cheese on top, and half for a packed lunch the next day.
Made by my mum or me on various days: boiled potato mashed with wilted spinach, some tuna, butter and olive oil.
And a *hot new favourite!* Noodles with peanut butter sauce and broccoli, made by Sam. Boiled egg noodles mixed with a dressing of: a little ginger and half a clove of garlic grated, peanut butter, sesame oil, vinegar, a splash of soy sauce, and warm water from boiling the noodles to loosen. Boiled broccoli.
I've been reading your work for a good few years now, and i find it so helpful that we seem to have had babies at the same time. My daughter is a few months older than yours I think, and your newsletter was always a lovely read, but now its infused with these additional qualities. Firstly a recognition of shared experience - locating that one good egg in your NCT group! - but I'm also finding it reassuring to read your experience of parenting and cooking. Sometimes i worry that I'm loosing my curiosity and interest in cooking, because i feel so pressed for time, and often feel inexplicable pressure to feed my daughter a certain way, but your clear simple recipes and notes on dinners you eat and feed your daughter make me feel a little less pressure. On a very basic but vital level they also provide inspiration for my weekly shop when i'm feeling flat out. So thank you!
PS: my favourite baby recipe of the moment: 1 mashed banana; 1 egg; enough porridge oats to make a paste, fried as patties in a little oil, dipped in maple syrup (for me), eaten squished into her fist while wandering around the flat for Margot.
One of my baby son's favourite meals was quite similar to that tuna confection.
A can of tuna, snipped spring or white onions, a handful of halved butter beans, some mayo, creme fraiche or sour cream, and a few minced capers stirred together, spread on one slice of toast and flashed under the grill with another slice of buttered toast squished on top. Later we began adding grated cheese, and a few pieces of minced gherkin and spreading mayo on the bread before it was toasted because I noticed that like me, he loved pickles and vinegar.