Liz Williams's Blog, page 42

Overheard in kitchen

T: "Your latest fictional creation, the vignette entitled "Sidney Has Not Had His Breakfast", needs a certain amount of work...."

Sid has now given up and gone to play Bash with Lily on the stairs.

Things domestic

T: [in moment of male entitlement:] Where are all my socks? And my shirts???

Me: Have you looked in the airing cupboard?

T: The what?

Me: It's a cupboard with a hot water tank in it. You know, the one that's been in the back bedroom for the 25 years you've lived in this house?

T: I thought that was for drying cats.

He is, regrettably, right.

Pancake Day II

We got back too late yesterday to make pancakes before the radio show, so we saved them for tonight and have just cooked a stack of crepes, with charcuterie, asparagus and cheese on the one hand, and smoked salmon, lumpfish caviar, sour cream and dill on the other. Real caviar is beyond the budget, although my former boss used to bring it back in jam jars from the former SU and we used to have it for lunch (sometimes he'd get lobsters from the sea front market and we'd have those, sitting on ...

Virtual Farmers' Market

We regularly visit the farmers' markets in Wells and Glastonbury, but sometimes (snow, time etc) it's not possible to visit. And so, local producers have gone onto - the Virtual Farmers' Market.

They are here:

http://www.vfmuk.com/

It has a walkthrough virtual market, like Second Life, which you can walk through.

A fire day

It is really Baltic out there, as my staff put it, and I was not expecting to do any gardening, but then A turned up and the sun came out and Sid wanted to inspect the vegetable patch - with the result that we all spent about an hour and a half out there. A tells me that this is a Fire Day, biodynamically: I am not at all well versed in Biodynamics (because of severe time constraints, things get done when we can) but it's all interesting stuff. Apparently this is when you concentrate on fruit...

Weekend

This has been a working weekend, but a lot has been going on. We spent Friday evening in the pub with E and her delightful friend J, a fellow Frenchwoman, then on Saturday I ran a workshop here dedicated to the Welsh deity Elen of the Ways, which went well. We got out onto the peat moors to do some of the work - full of swans, deer, and by the river at Shapwick the banks were full of enormous shells from what I presume to be freshwater mussels. I'm not even sure if there is such a thing and m...

Cookathon

A day at home does not always involve cooking, but today has, starting off with blueberry pancakes and hickory smoked bacon, Trevor's celeriac soup at lunch, and this evening I'm doing lamb chops with mash, red cabbage with juniper, and Feasten Cakes - these are apparently a traditional February recipe and involve saffron and yeast, so I suspect their origins are Medieval. Also doing a green bean and squash stew for the weekend workshop, which we'll be having with couscous and a chickpea thin...

Farmer's Market

We took some time out today and went to Wells farmer's market - this ran somewhat aground in the winter, with all the snow. One of the local supermarkets came to the rescue and everyone then fell foul of a 809 year old law:

http://www.thisissomerset.co.uk/people/Traders-cold/article-1709007-detail/article.html

Anyway, the snow has gone now, to be replaced by murky, sleety rain and general February dankness. There are some very good organic butchers at Wells, so we bought lamb in various forms, ...

Teaching post

I will be lecturing in English Lit at Strode College from late February - went in today to check out the syllabus etc (I'll be teaching THE GREAT GATSBY) and meet my new colleagues.

One of them, Maria McCann, is also a writer and has a Civil War novel out tomorrow with Faber, THE WILDING, so check it out. Her previous book, AS MEAT LOVES SALT, got rave reviews.

Books

I've now sent books to everyone who ordered them - so if they haven't shown up, please let me know!

I still have back stock for sale, so please email me if you're interested in buying novels - especially given the unfortunate situation with Amazon and Macmillan titles... It's mevennen(at)hotmail(dot)com