A wee tale... A grand feast... & a breakfast of peasants & champions! In true Basque tradition!!!

A 'hodgepodge' taken from a morsel or more of the 'leftovers' of my first novella, Zimmer...

All the same, available on Amazon Kindle, as a labour of love and all my favourite things...

A 'hodgepodge' in itself really!

Still, for now...

If you'll bare with the meandering and take the time for a warm cuppa...

Or Rioja!

A feast fit for king and peasant awaits!

And beyond!

A decidedly moreish and fortifying start to a gloriously unhurried day...

Championing leftovers with a breakfast of champions, relishing as I do, a lazy Sunday morning treat, compared to the usual get-up-and-go of a black coffee and shameful fag most other mornings!

So be kind. Do be kind. And I do hope you enjoy...

xxx

The morning off to a decidedly resolute start, Amelia walked briskly down the hill into the wind, carry bag in hand, and headed into town. Her usual editing work had been a little slow that month, and she was anxious to get started on her pressing list.

The local singular second-hand bookstore would be the first port of call.

“Hi. Um, where could I find your cookery books?” Amelia asked the woman at the counter.

“Bottom end of the second shelf to the left, dearie, just before the kiddie’s section,” the darling elderly lady replied, with a kind smile and a passing glance up from the Jane Austen collection held so comically close to her face it was almost touching the tip of her eccentrically bespectacled nose, most caricaturish, with her dishevelled greying bun atop her head and her hippie tunic and prayer beads, only a Converse sneaker cosied up to a MAXHOSA sock and peeping out from behind the counter to betray the general 70s bygone dishevelment.

Amelia thanked her and quietly slunk away to keep the shopkeeper from any further disturbances, leaving the latter to get back to her period fiction.

Finding herself in the right place, Amelia scanned the spines of the books in the lower level shelves of the cookery section, her resolve beginning to flail in the midst of the choices that lay before her. Finally, on hand and knee, at the tail end of the last shelf one of the spines jumped out and piqued her curiosity.

“Aphrodite’s Table by Mathilde Bellamy,” she whispered to herself. “Let’s give you a look then.” She had to admit she found the title titillating.

Making a note of where she’d found it, Amelia sat on a nearby stool.

The front cover was an intimate black and white of the author supping from a scallop shell in a high-backed dining chair so grand it lent her an almost stately, though irreverent, air.

The dust-jacket itself fraying around the edges in spite of Bellamy’s picture of perfection.

Amelia turned to the blurb at the back of the hardcover.

There she was met with a watercolour illustration of Bellamy in a vivacious red cardigan, forest green mini skirt and knee-high white go-go boots, holding a basket full of strawberries, set against a backdrop of irrepressible ivy and jasmine and black-eyed Susans, her mini threatening to get lost amongst the menagerie of plants.

A laugh in the face of the black and white cover, belying the true author.

"Dearest reader, welcome!

Collecting and treasuring as I have over the years, the recipes that have brought me together with fine friends from all across the globe, I invite you to join me on a culinary tour de force as we dine and worship at the table of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, passion, pleasure and life’s bountiful gardens.

If you find that you are living a life without appetite, then you are living no life at all. So please come and let us eat together, my newfound ‘belle amie’.

Mathilde with love"

Amelia read the blurb twice over.

She regarded the author again.

Pixie-esque features and mesmerising brown eyes, that Amelia imagined fluttered like butterflies beneath her girlish bangs beset by a coquettish bob of dark curls.

The watercolour illustration almost resembling a Keane’s ‘big eyes’ painting.

A publisher’s French wet dream.

But then again, there was something so seemingly unaffected and natural in the author’s bemused expression.

An upward, devillish turn in the corner of the rosy mouth.

Something that said, should you ever meet in person, Mathilde Bellamy could and would become one of your dearest friends. A true confidante.

The kind of friend to drink and be merry with until the very last drop was sucked dry from the bottle, long into those magical wee hours before dawn, when all the rest of the world was asleep.

But Amelia checked herself, fancifulness already getting the better of her.

She returned again to the cover.

Perhaps it was the candid front cover photograph of the author caught in the throes of culinary ecstasy, the root of it all a succulent scallop.

It reminded Amelia of her mother’s own unadulterated love of shellfish.

Her mother gone. But still palpable. Longed for. For all Amelia doubted she'd made her proud. Would have. Would have made her proud.

But longed for all the same. Mothers. Always longed for all the same.

Maybe that’s what did it.

The book some kind of a means, a conduit, with which to teleport her to a new and better version of herself, while at the same time, promising to transport her back to fonder times.

Perhaps the whimsical illustration on the back, for Amelia who craved just at least a little more (any!) whimsy in her life.

Why couldn’t she have it all?

She looked back on those generous big brown eyes, as Mathilde Bellamy seemed to affirm that yes, of course, all her heart’s secret longings should be fulfilled.

And for no more than the cost of chunk change for a second-hand find.

Amelia delighted in its slightly dog-eared pages.

Lifted the book to her nose and drank in the scent of a book well-travelled.

With history.

A story within a story.

She turned to the first page and found an inscription in fading brown ink.

Cursive.

"To my only, Margaret. My pearl. My Margie. ’05

You know I only married you for your money, and certainly not for your cooking! Thank you, Maude!!

With love, John. Just John for you. Forever."

Then and there, Amelia decided that another stray simply had to find a home with her.

“I’ll take this. Thank you.” Amelia presented the woman at the counter with the hardback. Transaction concluded, she marched confidently back out into the world, leaving the bookshop like she was that little kid again, her first triumphant cartwheel in the bag, beaming from ear to ear.

She hugged her new purchase close to her chest, in her cotton carry bag, all the way out of town and up the steep incline back to her cottage, as if her very life depended upon it.

For all she knew it just might well depend on it.

At the very least, there could be no going back now.

Of that much, she was certain.

No more banality, no more humdrum, she thought and jangled her house keys in tune to a happy melody in her head, one of her Nana’s old favourites, stepping over the threshold of her front door and calling out to Ailuros. That other stray.

“Honey, I’m ho-ome!”

But the cat was nowhere in sight.

She made herself a fresh mug of coffee and got comfortable on the sofa with Bellamy’s book, opening it to the introduction.

The author was grinning back at the camera, in a pretty floral apron, armed at the ready with an industriously large wooden spoon. The picture slightly yellowed, the page a little greasy and beset with a wine glass stain. But its subject matter triumphant all the same.

"Eating, even for one, should be, at its best, a celebration, a sensory and seductive exploration of orgasmic delight. No less so than a tryst between secret lovers enfolded in satin sheets, or a kiss stolen from a sweetheart.

Do not underestimate me when I say that good food is always, always, always, and so must be, so it shall be, imperative, fuelled by passion and desire.

When dining alone, in our dreary times of ready-made meals and drive-thru culture, it is for a woman an act of revolt.

Believe me, emphatically, that there is nothing quite as forlorn and in need of a warm embrace as a woman who has lost her appetite. Or worse, a woman who plainly denies it. Appetite begins in the home and with the self, with the meals we come to languish over and delight in, bite by bite, and spills deliciously out into all we do in life, making it all the sweeter for it.

To my mind there is no greater symbol of insatiable appetite than the mighty Aphrodite, risen from the ocean bed, the patron goddess of ladies of the night for her scandalous reputation of endless lovers as she reigned on earth and in the heavens above. And should we not all be recreated in her own image?

Insatiable, and proud of it.

Especially as women of a modern era.

So please, pour a glass of wine and raise a toast.

Be your own seductress. Call on music. Dust off your most provocative ensemble. Whatever makes you feel truly good.

There can be no shame in the kitchen.

Only indulgence and pleasure.

And then you may start in the kitchen... And turn the page!

But not a moment sooner. I demand it!

Some of the dishes in this book are so simple even a small child could manage them with little to no effort. Others will ask more of you. More of your time.

But sometimes all the better for it, like the slow dance and subtle flirtations between strangers who have only just met but know, come full moon, they will finally undress and ravish each other, morsel for morsel.

Orgasmic in simplicity, or excruciatingly titilating...

The voracious spirit in me welcomes the voracious spirit in you.

Now let us embark with a little uncontested decadence...

Or as I like to call it, foreplay!"

Perhaps it was a little early for wine. Not that she had any.

But Amelia was otherwise determined to follow Bellamy’s instruction to the letter.

First. Music.

She found some Fleetwood Mac on YouTube. Tusk her mother's favourite of all her vinyls.

Something about Stevie Nicks always made her feel free and loose.

Like dancing in the dark. Even if it was only just a little. It was better than nothing.

But something provocative?

She couldn’t think of a single item of clothing at her disposal.

She opened her wardrobe and pulled out a dusty box of her mother’s things from the top shelf. Although she hadn’t quite Georgina Young’s hourglass figure, it was worth a look.

She removed a soft cotton kimono style robe from the miscellaneous items in the box, immediately drawn to it. She’d loved that robe on her mother.

Its great billowing sleeves.

A silken and sensuous lavender tinged sky blue with such lovely bright orange and pink blossoms that even the honeybees in their garden would oftentimes mistake them for the real thing.

Her mother. Immortal. Longed for as mothers always are.

A robe...

Her mother's robe.

She considered it, hesitant at first.

Was it silly?

But then again, what was wrong with some silliness, some fun for a change?

Surely there had to be some perks to working from home.

Playlist streaming, and in nothing but her albeit uneventful knickers and an old cotton robe, Amelia was finally ready to play something of the part that Bellamy demanded of her, hoping that with the passing of time she would feel less of a fraud.

A dinner guest was The Plan.

Friend.

She hoped.

She turned to fate - kismet - and let the page fall where it may...

Poulet Basquaise

"If there is one region that holds me firmly in its hearty bosom it would have to be the Basque region. This dish pays homage to piment d’Espelette (or the Espelette pepper) with a classic pipérade sauce at its base. A quaint fairytale village in the interior of Labourd province in French Basque Country, Espelette’s picture-perfect streets are decorated annually by cottages dangling these glorious peppers out to dry from their facades.

While the larger region is renowned for fine cheeses and chocolate and the equally famous Bayonne ham (and for good reason!), it is this mildly spicy, sweet pepper that truly stands as the symbol of culinary pride and prestige. The origins of piment d’Espelette date all the way back to the 17th century, when a Basque sailor travelling with Christopher Columbus brought some chilli peppers back to the Basque Country.

At first they were used medicinally and for preserving meat, a tradition still followed in the curing of great chunks of Bayonne ham. With time, the Espelette pepper slowly found its way into the hearth and home to become a staple in everyday cooking. Today it is even celebrated every October in the Espelette pepper festival.

However, as it is only produced in ten villages in the region it is not always so easy to come by. I have my own coveted stash from my culinary travels but for all intents and purposes, you might substitute it in the pipérade with a sprinkling of mild chilli flakes and some smoked paprika.

Along with the red and green bell peppers, emblems of the Basque colours, plum tomatoes, garlic, shallots and the bouquet garni of fragrant thyme and bay leaves, I like to add gorgeously glossy, royally purple olives to my Poulet Basquaise before popping it into the oven.

It is the perfect meal for guests as it can be left unattended in a deep casserole dish to simmer away in its own juices and the white wine, until the liquid runs clear and it is succulent and ready. It is a simple country favourite of mine that begs little of the cook, only that she use the freshest and finest of a handful of ingredients that marry together most exultantly.

The more sauce the better, for I am often wont to pour any leftover pipérade into a pan the next day for a fine breakfast of eggs shakshouka style with chorizo. So don’t be stingy on the peppers!

To truly dine in Basque style, Poulet Basquaise is beautifully paired by day with a chilled bottle of fruity sparkling white wine such as they have in their locally made time-honoured txakoli or in the evening with a good bottle of La Rioja, indeed one of the region’s most magnificent exports.

This dish is best prepared in the pan in advance, ready to add to the casserole dish later when your company arrives for the longer the chicken has to stew in the pipérade, all the more flavoursome!

Whether you decide to serve it with a classic rice pilaf or on a bed of buttery, roughly smushed baby potatoes, it’s really up to you. I find a fluffy pilaf the perfect accompaniment for soaking up all those mouth-watering juices, but this is just a personal affectation. And when in doubt, I say why not go for a bit of both? These leftovers only get better with a little time. Either way, I can assure you, once the lid of that steaming casserole pot is lifted your dinner guests will not be disappointed!"

She lingered. Swaying to the music. Words washing over her.

Travelling by armchair as they said.

They said.

Still.

Travel.

Kind of.

Languishing.

In robe.

In music.

In book.

In Basque.

In what might be.

But eventually, nothing for it but to don her old faithful Calvin Klein denims.

And old Pixies fan shirt.

Comfortable. Perfunctory. But not for long. Not altogether. Not forever.

Amelia copied the ingredients for her list.

Lists steadied her. Mothers always longed for.

Two green and two red bell peppers.

Four chicken legs that she’d need to have jointed at the request of the butcher into thighs and drumsticks.

Two shallots and three cloves of garlic.

Three bay leaves and two sprigs of fresh thyme.

Four juicy plum tomatoes.

Half a bottle of dry white wine.

A glug of olive oil.

A cup of pitted olives.

Baby potatoes for ‘smushing’ and rice for the pilaf.

There, that seemed simple enough.

Home again, Amelia placed the two bottles of full-bodied rosé into the refrigerator to chill.

The bottles had come highly recommended by the winesellers as an ideal accompaniment for both the chicken and the early evening affair.

Wine seen to, she turned on a plate on the gas stove and browned her chicken pieces in the olive oil, before removing them from her Nana’s old iron pot, only to add the diced shallots, sweating them before adding the garlic.

Next came the roughly chopped peppers, tomatoes, olives, spices and herbs, all topped up and over with the stock and white wine.

The chicken placed gently back into the pot, into the oven it went to slowly cook away until it was time to feast.

The rice pilaf would be prepared later with a generous helping of the juices from the Poulet Basquaise.

In the meantime, to stay ahead of schedule, Amelia placed the baby potatoes on the boil, and chopped the parsley for garnish with another new addition to her kitchen, a mezzaluna.

As with her pestle and mortar, this charming knife emboldened the otherwise kitchen-shy Amelia and brought a smile to her face.

Now all that was left to do was to whip on her gladrags, dismal but still, and well, but an effort, and then, she'd just have to await Mr Walsh’s imminent arrival.

Again, friend.

She hoped.

No sooner had she changed her attire than the doorbell rang.

Giving herself a final looking over in her closet mirror, bland but black, a calm steady breath in and slow exhalation out, Amelia went to greet her dinner guest, a curious Ailuros at her heels.

Amelia excused herself to attend to the pilaf, donning the apron from the professor’s late wife with a dutiful sense of honour for the gift bestowed upon her, so thoughtful and unique as it was.

And in no time at all, the meal came together, the young cook thrilled at the result.

Was it not magic?

This thing called cooking?

Each recipe no less than a glorious conjuring spell? Oh she hoped. Again, he hoped.

Perhaps she was a little drunk, but it certainly felt so.

She’d followed the spell as Bellamy had written, and here was a sumptuous magic trick for two, though the proof would be in the pudding.

Bringing the meal to the table with a pair of oven mitts, steam rising from the pilaf and the fragrant casserole, the professor clapped, “Bravo!”

The potatoes set down to round off the meal, with a generous sprinkling of parsley, Amelia realised she had forgotten to remove the apron.

The professor reached a hand out to hers. He gave it a squeeze and a nod in thanks. “A good home for an apron. I dare say my Val would’ve liked you. And of course, your savvy feline. Cats are such knowing beasts. Ailuros has a true blue in you.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to our hostess!”

Quiet descended as they tucked in, interrupted now and again only by the clang of cutlery, and Amelia took that to be the assurance she needed that her meal had been a triumph for the day.

Satiated and both a little sleepy eyed from the wine and the feast, Amelia offered the professor an after dinner espresso.

She had recently splurged on a little stovetop espresso maker for just such an occasion.

If nowhere else showed much semblance of a home, at least her little kitchen had so far thrived since that fateful scribbling of a to-do list.

Espressos in hand, they quietly contemplated the starry night sky, while not a breath of wind whispered, as if all the world was at peace without stirring.

It was an easy kind of quiet that they shared.

Amelia thought to herself, that if anything, perhaps this was the real mark of making a friend, someone with whom she could simply be, without feeling the brash impulse to fill the gaps in conversation.

In her heart of hearts, in that moment, sipping on her coffee, without a word needed between them and so very contented, Amelia was overwhelmed with gratitude for the professor and his generosity of spirit.

It seemed to spill over and make merry of her humble little space.

She remembered a German word she’d learnt a long time ago… Zimmer…

Meaning a space in a home. She had loved that word. It seemed to glimmer somehow with endless possibility.

Zimmer…

She mouthed it again in her mind as she closed her eyes and soaked it all in like a truly soothing balm to the soul.

-

Although Amelia had sent the professor home with the bulk of the leftovers – for that seemed like the right thing to do for the widower – she still had her fair share of the pipérade sauce left for breakfast.

As Bellamy’s recipe instructed for Eggs and Chorizo Shakshouka (or Shakshuka) Style, she first crisped the slices of chorizo in the pan before adding the sauce with peppers and tomatoes, with the addition of another half a teaspoon of chilli flakes for added heat.

And finally the eggs were cracked into the pan and covered with a lid until sunny side up and ready to tuck in, straight out of the pan, with a side of oven toasted sourdough.

Amelia thought in this moment, how far she had come from the black coffee and segmented grapefruit half barely a day or so ago.

It was a cold morning, a light rain rushing by with the icy wind in sheets against the muted tones outside, glum and gloomy.

As she nestled into the sofa with breakfast, she was grateful for the warmth of the meal.

Ailuros was still fast asleep on the bed, barely having stirred in hours.

Amelia however, felt a restlessness in herself.

She had showered that morning, before breakfast, but all in her cupboard had seemed so very dull.

Little colour. Little flair.

She thought again on all her Nana’s silk stockings, how bright, how luxurious.

When she was in the kitchen, she had begun to sense an emboldened version of herself creeping in, slowly but surely, whether chopping herbs with her mezzaluna or preparing a freshly ground espresso with her new stovetop maker.

But in all other aspects, she came undone with her aspirations.

She was just the plain old freelance editor she’d always been, leaving little to chance in her life as in her work. Simply dotting i’s and crossing t’s. A full stop here and a full stop there.

Few exclamation points, and nothing in the way of promising ellipses.

It wasn’t quite that she didn’t like who she was.

She just wanted to be a smidgeon more in life, if she only tried a little harder.

Just a smidgeon.

That didn’t seem too much to ask.

T

The flavoursome chorizo shakshouka having braced her for the outdoors, she gave the dozing feline a stroking.

“See ya later, sleepy,” she whispered.

Green peppers and tomatoes by Asha Sudhaker Shenoy