The broccoli pesto worked out pretty well. The result is thick, not liquid like herbal pesto, but the garlic, almonds, and lemon nicely flavoured the broccoli. I used the pesto with linguine (and minced pork meatballs), because linguine turned out to be the only pasta I had in the cupboard. That wasn't the best choice for a thick puree, but it would work nicely mixed with a grain as the recipe suggests. And I did use up all the broccoli. Now on to the swiss chard and pointed cabbage.
I signed up for the veg box scheme for the very reason that I am now forced to deal with difficult vegetables that I would not be drawn to choose on a quick trip to the market. I find the summer vegetables much less interesting than the winter vegetables. Partly that is because England does not have enough of a summer to grow the traditional summer vegetables that require lots of hot sunshine. Tomatoes were mostly sad Dutch agribusiness products of the pale and crunchy variety. Until the Isle of Wight tomato people started producing luscious varieties and selling them at Borough Market and now at farmers' markets, I had given up on eating tomatoes here. For some reason the Isle of Wight, in the English Channel off the mid-south coast, has more sunshine than most places. Corn-on-the-cob remains a problem however. We have had a few ears that were up to the standards of New England sweetness and flavour over the past 11 years, but sourcing has been random, and most purchases have been binned after a single bite. For the English, the variety of corn they love is called "Niblets," easily found in tins, and to be used to enhance all sorts of cold dishes, especially tuna salad sandwiches. They might also believe that Niblets are raw delicacies based on these two incidents. Years ago at a regional Food Festival, the Isle of Wight people were handing out cobs broken into small pieces for tasting. I bit into mine and said "this is not cooked." The purveyor looked at me in confusion saying "It doesn't need cooking." (We did buy some ears, took them home, cooked them, and they were the best we have had here in England.) Second, last summer when Susan was on an archaeological dig in Cyprus with students from a Welsh University, some local residents brought them ears of corn for their dinner, and she reported that several of the students were unaware of the need to cook corn. Fortunately she had a few allies who also insisted that corn did need cooking.
We stayed in to eat the broccoli last night instead of eating at Pizza Express with our good friend Pam who is 91. Pam and her grandson eat at Pizza Express every Thursday evening, and Bob and I often join them. After dinner, I remembered that I wanted to see Pam last night so that I could ask her where she was on the day 70 years ago. I know she was 21 years old, and a student at the London School of Economics after spending a half-year studying in Vienna. I know she moved back home to the family farm when she and her medical school student brother lost their digs on Lambs Conduit Street in a bombing raid. I know she lost her precious copy of Virginia Woolf's Flush in the raid, and was terribly pleased when a few year's ago a friend gave her a new copy of Flush, reprinted by Nicola Beauman's Persephone Press whose main office and shop is located on Lamb's Conduit Street. I know she worked on the family farm as a Land Girl for a time, before moving back into London to work in a government office where she helped to type William Beveridge's 1942 Report which laid out the framework of Britain's post-war welfare state, including the establishment of the National Health Service. But I don't know where she was 70 years ago yesterday. So I had to make do with a Melvyn Bragg narrated documentary from the Imperial War Museum on TV last night to mark the 70th Anniversary of Britain's (and France's) entry into the war. A war that has moulded every aspect of all our lives since the day it ended 64 years or demographically, two generations, ago: politics, international relations, economics, arts, education, land use, even personal relationships through parenting, feminism, and the rise of youth culture. Lots of good decisions were made and some very bad decisions were made in the hothouse atmosphere of the immediate post-war world in the US, in England, and in Europe.
Leading to why I spent the latter half of yesterday feeling down and depressed about how the US seems to have learned nothing from some of those bad decisions. A mid-afternoon (UK time zone) front page on the New York Times web-site told me that the US was ready to dive into a new Vietnam called Afghanistan -- which was something Garry Trudeau in Doonesbury had been sounding the warning bell on this week already. A second article on the front-page told me that the newly elected administration in Washington was allowing a truly stupid and mean-spirited minority rump of US citizens to once-again hijack the health-care agenda, thereby denying the right to decent medical care to more and more of our citizens. How can it be that my native land no longer wants to be seen as a civilised nation nor wants to be respected by the rest of the world? How have we moved from John Winthrop's "Citty on a Hill" to Cormac McCarthy's The Road?
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