Questions, questions, questions…

The very lovely Gastronomy Domine has given me five testing questions to answer for this blog (thank you Liz). The answers are quite long so I’m going to split them up into five separate entries. I can never give a straight answer to anything…

1. Have you ever eaten the perfect meal – one where the food, company and surroundings were just spot on?

2. You’ve mentioned that you’re moving to Ireland. Are you finding that a move to a whole different land mass is more challenging than a normal house move? Are you apprehensive? Excited?

3. You are not a friend of the aubergine. What other food loves and hates do you have?

4. Do you have anytips for other book hoarders? How can we save money on shelving space, find our way through the piles of books all over the bedroom floor and deal with our increasing myopia? Do you organise your books alphabetically or by subject, or do they end up shelved haphazardly like mine?

5. Is there a kitchen implement you simply couldn’t live without?

Cor. Considering I’m an editor by trade, I’m not very good at cutting my own copy.

Q1 – the perfect meal

Have you ever eaten a perfect meal – one where the food, company and surroundings were just spot on?

Yes, I can think of one and it involves my husband – so anyone of an unromantic disposition should skip to the next blog entry.

Although, at first glance, it’s quite an unlikely one – tapas in Amsterdam. It’s a perfect example, I guess, of how circumstance and company can heighten the experience of food.

It was my birthday, about six years ago now when we were still girlfriend/boyfriend, and we’d ended up going away for a long weekend. Lots of wandering around, holding hands, going to museums and finding which tearoom had the best apple cake. (I’m being careful here by not saying ‘café’, which would give the wrong impression.)

The night before, we’d strolled past a tapas bar, which looked cosy and full of people having a good time. Yes, that looked perfect for a birthday celebration. And so it turned out to be, with some extra help from the weather gods.

Because my birthday is in August it had been hot, hot, hot every day and kick-off-the-sheets uncomfortable at night. By the time we’d started off for the tapas bar, the ominous-looking thunderclouds has ripped open – Amsterdam was being hammered with rain and lightening was flickering across the sky.

When we got there, we found that the tapas bar was full (and we cleverly hadn’t bothered booking). But we could sit outside if we wanted to.

Uhuh. Right. Had they looked out of the window?

Don’t worry about that, they said. And promptly put out some awning, a couple of heaters, some rickety chairs and wobbly tables, then took our order.

So I ate tapas and drank wine with my favourite person in the universe, outside in the middle of a thunderstorm on my birthday, trying not to fall off my unstable chair. I don’t know how authentic the food really was and I can barely remember what I ate, but I know that it tasted good. And that the combination of the dramatic setting and the love of my life enhanced the enjoyment of the whole experience many times over.

The funny thing was, we tried to find the place the next time we were in Amsterdam and we couldn’t. Of course, it could have shut down, but we decided to believe that the bar had Terry Pratchett-eque properties and so, like one of the shops in his Discworld books, it could disappear and pop up in new locations around the world to make more people happy. Told you this was a soppy post.

Q2 – goodbye Edinburgh, hello Ireland

You’ve mentioned that you’re moving to Ireland. Are you finding that a move to a whole new land mass is more challenging than a normal house move? Are you apprehensive? Excited?

It’s all very exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. Perhaps this is a good point to provide some background to the big change – something I should have done in my first post, perhaps but I couldn’t get my thoughts straight at the time.

Many moons ago, I met my Irish husband-to-be in Edinburgh. And we decided to set up home here, get married, all that kind of boring domestic stuff.

Then work came up for him back in Ireland – about six months before our wedding in Edinburgh last July. So off he went. The idea was that I would join him as soon after the big day as possible, because the work was, er, working out for him. And I can do what I do just about anywhere (fingers crossed), so it made sense for me to move.

Now, it’s pretty clear that I’m a little late with the whole moving shebang. This is because I was offered a really good career move job for 10 months… in Edinburgh.

After talking it over with Mr B., I decided to go for it with his full support (he’s so fab). It could only help me with finding a job when I finally made the move, I reasoned (we’ll find out soon, I guess).

So we got married in July 2006, went on honeymoon to Italy and then came back to our respective countries to get on with work.

What it’s meant since then is a lot of pinging back and forth between Dublin and Edinburgh (I know the Ryan Air and Aer Lingus flight times off by heart) and enormous phone bills.

I like to tell people that I keep my husband in a separate country. That may be all very well and good if you’ve been married for 20 years and can’t stand each other. But we’re at the beginning of it all and we’d quite like to, you know, see each other every day. It’s not an unreasonable expectation, methinks.

Back to the main question… I’m being optimistic (naive?) about the logistics of moving to a different land mass. And I’m hoping that it will be relatively straightforward as the house is ready at the other end, so there’s no issue with waiting for people to move out etc that you get with a normal house move. It’s probably one of those things where I could tell you afterwards where it went wrong!

So far there haven’t been any problems – although that also worries me as it makes me suspect that there’s a big spanner just waiting to clog up the works. Like the ferry with all our possessions might sink on the way over. All fingers and toes crossed for a safe passage.

I’m sad to be leaving behind such all my friends and a fantastic city. That’s what upsets me most. And I’m not happy about having to look for a new job and all that entails. (‘Basically, I’m a people person but I can work on my own… My greatest fault? Oh, that would be my perfectionist streak…blah blah blah.’)

But the flip side is that it’s a whole new adventure – lots to find out, lots to explore – and I’m really looking forward to that. Did I say something about wanting to spend time with my wonderful husband? That’s quite a plus as well.

I’m also unreasonably excited about living in a country where you don’t have to hunt down 284ml cartons of buttermilk – you can get it in big tetrapaks and it’s right next to the milk on the shop shelf. Hurray!

Q3 – my nemesis

You are not a friend of the aubergine. What other food loves and hates do you have?

Last year, I tried blogging but gave up pretty quickly when that job I stayed behind in Edinburgh for took over my life.

One of my very few blog entries was about how much I disliked aubergines and that, despite all this, I was going to conquer my repulsion in a way that would make Jeffrey Steingarten proud – by cooking aubergine in as many different ways as possible until I learned to love the damn thing.

Liz saw my post and kindly suggested that I try aubergine caviar. Over the course of the past year I’ve made both that recipe and several others, and now I can honestly say that I don’t dislike it any more. I just don’t love it.

Other dislikes… are few and far between really. I’ll try most things once or twice – how else are you supposed to find out?

One thing, which is more of a preference really, is that I’d much rather have tea than coffee. I’ve just never developed the taste for it. Mr B., on the other hand, is a coffee man through and through and would rather drink dishwater than tea. We have a gentleman’s agreement that I won’t try to make his coffee and he won’t attempt to make my tea.

Oh, and I don’t like Stilton. Scooping out the centre and filling it with port doesn’t make it any better. Just wrong.

I love chocolate but it depends on my mood as to what I want. Sometimes I’ll want a couple of squares of something really good with a high cocoa content. Other times I’ll want the kind of crud from my childhood – Double Deckers were, and still are, a particular favourite. For some reason though, I don’t like mint and chocolate together – perhaps some After Eight trauma inflicted in early youth.

Bread – that’s another great love. I would never be able to go on the Atkins diet. In fact, I tried out the Carol Vorderman detox diet once, which was equally disapproving of carbs, and I cracked after 36 hours because I walked past a bakery and all I could smell was warm bread fresh out of the oven… (deliberate self-sabotage?) Love it, love it, love it.

I have some hazy domestic vision of standing around and making a lot of bread after I move. But I suspect the panicky reality of trying to find a job may intefere with that slightly.

Other stuff I love includes… fresh strawberries that actually taste of something (ditto tomatoes), pesto, pickles of all kinds, apples, cinnamon, gingerbread, asparagus, pancakes, chickpeas, anything with some kind of starch element (mmmm starch), coriander, fennel, lemons, chillis, fresh herbs, a really good homemade burger, noodles, a crisp, crunchy apple, earthy soup on a cold winter’s day, roasted veggies with Sunday dinner and Yorkshire pudding, puddings in general… God, I’m hungry.

Q4 – the book habit and how to deal with it

Do you have any tips for other book hoarders? How can we save money on shelving space, find our way through piles of books all over the bedroom floor and deal with our increasing myopia? Do you organise your books alphabetically or by subject, or do they end up shelved haphazardly like mine?

I wish I had a good answer to this one, I really do. But I’m already too far into the book addiction to acknowledge the sensible answer of culling them. Maybe we all need some kind of support group.

An ex-boyfriend once told me that I was half girl, half book. I took that as a compliment but apparently he meant it as an insult. We didn’t last long after that.

Fast forward an untold number of years and I’ve found someone else whose DNA also has a good deal of paper in it and we’ve never looked back.

Unfortunately, this has led to a leetle storage problem, which is about to get worse. As I’ve already said, I’m in Edinburgh. This means I have all the books from university onwards (where I studied literature) and several hundred cookbooks. Mr. B has some of his books here too from the time we actually managed to live in the same country for more than five minutes. But he also has a lot of books stashed away at his parents’ house, just waiting to take the 30-minute trip up the road to our new place.

What this means for my current situation is double-stacked shelves, the Edinburgh press is full of my cookbooks, plus the shelves in the hallway and there are innumerable tottering stacks all over the place, as well as the boxes under the bed. There are even cookbooks on the bed at the moment, where Mr. B would normally sleep if he was here or if I was there. A psychologist would have a field day.

Neither of us can throw/give any away because of that nagging fear that you just might need/want it again.

The good news is that we’re moving from a flat to a house. What we think we’re going to do is shelve the back wall of the kitchen/dining room from top to bottom, squeeze in as many books as we can. Consider it an extra layer of insulation for the house.

But I’m not sure that the best answer to the book/space problem is to move house every time your book collection gets out of hand. Back to Terry Pratchett again – someone else who I suspect has a book habit, although I can’t prove it. But who else would have invented L-space? We need some brainy scientists to prove that L-space really exists and then we can buy/store as many books. Until then, we may need to start mapping the stacks in this dimension and leave instructions for loved ones to come and find us if we’re not back by nightfall.

Nothing is ever, ever in alphabetical order. That would be scary – and would give me flashbacks to that ex-boyfriend again. He used to lovingly alphabetise all his CDs. It was never really going to work out, was it?

Q5 – kitchen essentials

Is there a kitchen implement you simply couldn’t live without?

After scrutinising the jumbled contents of my little blue kitchen, I’d probably have to say my American measuring cups.

A good number of the cookbooks piled up around the flat are from America – a nation which had the absolutely brillant idea to ditch the cumbersome scales and use cups instead. I’d say that I cook from these recipes at least two or three times a week at the moment, maybe more. So having the right measuring cups is pretty essential.

It’s quicker, there’s less fiddling around and, because it’s a measure of volume not weight, I find it easier to guess-timate what a ‘cup’ of anything would look like if I’m buying ingredients, rather than, say, 200 grams. That’s just the way my brain works.

The kitchen implement that I don’t have but intend to make my next purchase is a microplane grater. Anyone I know who has one says it’s fantastic/something they can’t live without. Goodbye to trying to chop ginger into tiny pieces but being thwarted by its pesky fibres. Ditto crappy dicing of garlic. Hello to effortless prep.