Despite my encouragement to unsubscribe if any of you are bored by these musings, none of you did. I will take no news as good news. I must be doing something right.

That said, I have read in a day and a half Thom Eagle’s very good book Psychogastronomy, which makes me realise that there is a level of quality when it comes to food writing that I will never attain. Thom’s writing is excellent. His various snippets on the virtues of cheddar cheese, and the difference between pickling things and fermenting things, and the qualities of vinegar, were the sole reason for the cheddar, piccalilli, mayonnaise and cos lettuce sandwiches that I made when we got home from the train station this afternoon. The quality of Thom’s cooking far surpasses mine too, so really at this point all I can do is suggest you subscribe to his Substack

Monday

Dinner is a bit odd. I’m the first to admit it. Let me explain.

I have a container of sausages in the fridge, leftover from the Bunnings sausage sizzle that we had on the roof on Sunday. They need using up, but I want something other than leftover sausages and salad for dinner.

While sitting in one of the duller meetings of the day, I conjure up a dish of leftover sausages with rice, Lao Gan Ma chilli sauce and a smacked cucumber salad. Surprisingly, it’s a very delicious plate of food. Though as Phil points out it’s not a great surprise, really. Each element on its own is delicious. Combined, they were bound to be good.

NB: For those unfamiliar with the concept of a Bunnings sausage sizzle, please see here.

Tuesday

We have burgers again, because I have things leftover from last week’s Bitch’s Burgers dinner that need using up. This time we have our burgers with a handful of wedges on the side. Not nasty bitch tonight, just Basic Bitch.

While preparing dinner I also busy myself making something for Phil and I to take to work the next day for lunch - a chicken, snow pea, coriander and spring onion noodle salad with a chilli and ginger dressing. Phil comes into the kitchen as I’m cooking the noodles, and his reaction to thinking we’re having noodles for dinner is child-like excitement. I break his heart when I tell him we’re actually having burgers. He feigns enthusiasm. Then I make his day by delivering him a small tasting plate of the lunch noodles while he keeps trawling through shareholder agreements (can you think of anything worse?)

Wednesday

It was forecast to rain, but it hasn’t, which feels like the perfect excuse for a drink outside a pub in the last of the evening sunshine. So we do that, and then come home for dinner which is Middle Eastern spiced chicken thighs that I’ve had in the freezer for a while (bought on special at Waitrose, naturally - though somewhat embarrassingly when I think back to the quality of Thom Eagle’s writing and cooking), with couscous, a salad of tomatoes and olives and radishes and herbs, some shredded lettuce and thick Greek yoghurt. It’s good.

The trick to good couscous - and essential ingredient in my view - is lots of butter. Plus a good glug of extra virgin olive oil. My water to couscous ratio is one cup of couscous to one and a half cups of water. If you’re feeding two, that’ll give you enough couscous for lunch the next day.

Thursday

Rather a British dinner tonight. Roast pork loin, which is more ham-ish than it is pork-ish, with piccalilli, new jersey potatoes and asparagus. At first I am annoyed that I have gone to all of the effort to make something delicious, and the lawyer ends up working late. But it all works out well: room temperature pork/ham and room temperature spuds are just fine, good even.

I decide we need strawberries and whipped cream for pudding.

Friday

An old friend from New Zealand has a night to spare in London at the end of a week of work before he embarks on the dreaded 24+ hour flight home. We have drinks at various watering holes in Farringdon and Clerkenwell, and eat surprisingly good souvlaki at the Greek place on Farringdon Road. We finally decide we need to head home just before 1am, but before we make it there spend the better part of half an hour in the Rosebery Kebab Shop, eating kebabs and burgers and talking with the owners about their decision to sell boxes of Ribena rather than bottles of Powerade. They do a good job of trying to justify their business decision, but their rationale makes no sense at all. That said, the burgers and kebabs are surprisingly very good, though one can’t be sure whether that’s just because of all of the spicy margaritas.

One of the guys takes the piss out of me for how I pronounce “delicious”. He reckons it’s hilarious.

Saturday

We are in Margate for the Bank Holiday weekend. Dinner is at Bottega Caruso, which happens to be the restaurant where the aforementioned Thom Eagle can usually be found cooking (though not when we’re there). It’s an extraordinary place, and Saturday’s dinner is one of the best meals we’ve had in the UK - both the food, and the service, mostly from a guy our age who used to live in Melbourne (“what the fuck are you doing here?” we all ask one another).

We share giardiniera, buffalo mozzarella with a Spring mix of broad beans and fresh peas and artichoke and spring onion, a salad of house-canned tuna with borlotti beans and Marinda tomatoes, and the most extraordinary polpette made using leftover bread, cooked in the restaurant owner’s family’s tomato sauce. I am still thinking about those polpette, still baffled by how something made with old bread tasted both so good, and so much like meat. We then have two plates of pasta, which are meant to be for sharing, but Phil doesn’t do a particularly good job of evenly portioning the spaghetti with local lobster and crab. My ziti con ragu di agnello e arancia (pasta with lamb shoulder and sausage cooked with mint, saffron, tomato and orange zest, finished with grated sheep’s cheese) is excellent. Lemon gelato and boozy strawberries to finish.

This is a special place. If you’re ever in Margate, you must go.

Sunday

We have dinner at Dory’s, a fish restaurant owned by the people who also own Angela’s, which is another fish restaurant, and which has a small boutique hotel upstairs, which is where we’ve (very happily!) stayed. The food at Dory’s is quite lovely - soused mussels with aioli, asparagus with a vinaigrette and crispy breadcrumbs, grilled hispi cabbage, a piece of hake with carrots and prawn bisque, and an unmemorable bowl of chickpeas with tomatoes and spinach - but the service is dreadful. All of our ‘small plates’, which aren’t that small given the smallness of the table we’re sitting at, arrive at the same time. There is no room for them. We end up, reluctantly, having to be brats and turn away the mackerel we’ve ordered (at the waitress’ suggestion that we ought to have five or six dishes), because there simply is no room for it on our table. The result is a rushed dinner, funny combinations of food, and by our standards, very little to drink because there is no room or need. A shame that such good food, in a beautiful seaside spot, is ruined by what feels like “we want to get the fuck out of here and go home” service from the staff.

We are also slightly bemused that after having placed our order, we’re told we’ve ordered well, but that the thing we’ve not got right is the lack of bread. Those words. I find it intriguing that a dish that requires bread in order to ‘work’ doesn’t just come with it anyway - and a price adjusted accordingly.

Moods are lifted with post-dinner glasses of chilled red wine, a great view of the spectacular sunset, and several games of Yahtzee with a block of rum and raisin chocolate from the offy.

Other bits and bobs

On Friday morning I baked a banana loaf - the recipe I’ve been baking since I was about 14 years old, and which came from a book about it being cool to be a teenage girl who liked to eat (not that I needed any encouragement). We took the loaf in our bags to Margate, and ate slices with butter and cups of coffee in bed each morning we were there. Heavenly.

Bought a coronation chicken sandwich from Myddleton’s Deli to eat on the train to Margate on Saturday afternoon, but ate the whole damn thing before we’d even left the house for the train. A very, very good sandwich. I’m not sure I could’ve stomached it on the train, which smelt like a rum factory, what with all of the 20-something-year-olds that had overtaken the train on their way to a music festival at Dreamland, with their cheap tins of pina colada and bottles of Captain Morgan that they were decanting into plastic cups.

A treat to also have lunch at La Cantina in Margate on Sunday - the sister wine bar of Bottega Caruso. We share more giardiniera with a plate of very good sourdough and extra virgin olive oil, and the most generously laden bowl of marinated white anchovies. We remark more than once that you’d only get six laid artfully on a plate in London. Then we have a piece of toast topped with stracciatella and more anchovies, and a bowl of extraordinarily good Italian wedding soup (I regret only ordering one), and a piece of lasagne that is, dare I say, possibly even better than my Dad’s, which I have always maintained is the greatest lasagne in the world.

On Sunday afternoon we walk from Broadstairs back to Margate - just over two hours of walking, with various stops along the way, for cones of mint chocolate chip ice cream and a dip of our toes in the ocean and photos of old castles and the coastal scenery that we miss so much. Once we’re back in Margate, we buy little plastic pottles of prawn cocktail, and a prosecco for me and Peroni for Phil, from the little seaside seafood stall that’s been owned by the same family since 1962. The prawn cocktail is admittedly just a scoop of shelled prawns with a generous squirt of Marie Rose sauce straight from a commercial plastic bottle, but there’s something charming about it, and nothing quite like eating seafood and sipping fizzy wine from a plastic cup by the sea.

On Monday morning, before boarding our train back to London, we go to the Dalby Cafe, a Margate greasy spoon, for breakfast. One sausage, one fried egg, one piece of bacon, one piece of toast and tomatoes, which appear to be straight from a tin and are surprisingly okay, with a side of hash browns and a cup of coffee each for about 16 quid. Good pre-journey fodder. All that we need for the train is a Tunnock’s caramel log.

Right, off to continue my winning Yahtzee streak. Until next time!