Getting carried away by the community spirit

I get these enthusiasms, sometimes. I really ought to learn to resist them. They only ever get me into trouble.

Our neighbourhood meets nightly to applaud healthcare workers

In my defence, I’ve been impressed by the way the lockdown has brought out the best in our neighbours, in the little group of houses where we live just outside Valencia. We’ve had gifts of oranges and lemons (no, nothing to do with St Clements) from one neighbour, and we’ve had full meals from others – a paella from one, lentils from another, from a third a rice dish which we were told was absolutely not a paella though to my untrained eye it looked exactly like one (apparently it was made from mountain rice, not rice from the plains where we live, which makes it absolutely, definitely and undeniably not a paella).

From a neighbour: a rice dish (definitely not paella)
and home-made turón (nougat) as a dessert

Danielle responded in the Marie-Antoinette spirit, letting them eat cake. On one occasion she made a lemon drizzle cake, from some of the lemons we were given, and on another an orange cake, from the oranges. Both were delicious and well received.

And that’s when the enthusiasm grabbed me.

“What can I do?” I thought. Followed by a brainwave. “I know! I can cook for everyone.”

“Not for everyone,” said Danielle, incredulously.

“Well, why not?” I replied. “I can do something easy.” And, as an afterthought, I added, “easy and not too expensive.”

That was because I’d first toyed with the idea of doing a smoked salmon kedgeree, one of the dishes I most like preparing, but which costs a small fortune (I’m still paying off the last one).

“I know,” I went on, “given my Italian roots, I’ll make a pollo alla cacciatora.”

I was born in Rome, you see. Still, I guess you can call the dish ‘hunter’s chicken’, given where I got the recipe from. That’s how I cook, by the way. Always from a recipe. I lack the genius to just sort of invent dishes, or improvise them. And in this instance, I was going to use a recipe from the Guardian newspaper.

Well, as the Guardian itself keeps reminding me, ‘trust has never mattered more’. If I turn to the Guardian for reliable information, I might just as well turn to it for my recipes, too. After all, I only have to swallow the information metaphorically; cooking I have to swallow literally.

Got to be sure you can trust the source when you’re going to eat the product.

The sauce too.

Danielle kindly did the shopping. We pretend that’s because I need extra protection from potential carriers of the Coronavirus – men are more inclined to die of it than women, and we suspect Danielle’s already had it anyway, so she may be immune. 

The reality is that her going instead of me has little to do with the pandemic. It’s more that she picks all the things she wants from one supermarket aisle before going into another aisle. I, because I can never remember where anything else is, pick up things from coolers at one side of the supermarket, next go over to the far side to get some fruit, then come back to the freezers, before remembering that I needed vegetables as well as fruit, and they’re right next to each other.

This means that it takes me three times as long as it takes her, and usually I come back having failed to find at least two items from the list.

Finally, the day dawned for my great act of community service. The cooking time was only three-quarters of an hour. I called it an hour to allow for slippage. Another hour would cover chopping carrots and celery and garlic. And then I built in an extra hour just for leeway.

Given that I was preparing a lunch for Spaniards, so for 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon, I started work at 11:00.

Do you know, chopping stuff for 16 people takes far, far longer than chopping for three or four? Who knew?

I raced the clock. But when the time got to 2:05 with the 45-minute cooking time still not started, I had to acknowledge the inevitable. Lunch was going to be late even by Spanish standards. It was a depressing realisation. I’d made a commitment. I wasn’t going to keep to it. Honestly, it made me feel like a politician. Really bleak.

That’s the thing with my enthusiasms. I set myself up for failure.

Still, late as it was, in the end the lunch wasn’t a complete washout. Normally you should serve a cacciatora with rice or polenta, but I’m not cooking rice for the connoisseurs in the Valencia region, and I’ve never even tried my hand at polenta. They got mashed potato instead. Well, I fancied it. And it’s not something that gets served much around here.

“Mashed potato!” said one of the neighbours, “just like my mother used to make.”

My Guardian-based pollo alla cacciatora.
And definitely not polenta

I can’t be sure that’s a compliment, but I’ve decided to take it as one.

They all said they liked the meal, anyway. I tried it myself, and it seemed OK, so perhaps they weren’t just being polite. After all, it was made with Danielle’s ingredients, a ridiculous amount of work by me, and the backing of the supremely trustworthy Guardian.

There was no good reason for it to go wrong, right? It just represented a lot more work than I’d hoped.

Me and my bursts of enthusiasm.