Posts of random satisfaction…

Here’s tonight’s supper – and the reason I’m excited is not, actually, because it’s beef and saffron and borlotti beans but because I’m within a few aces of completing Yashim’s latest adventure in The Latin Reader.

 

It’s rather like standing near the finishing line, jumping up and down as your horse appears down the final straight… Clues to hook up, scenes to be set, with character twists that even surprise me – and terrible decisions still to be made. All that before I go back and read it all through from the begining, a luxury I will not indulge while I write. In the meantime I have to get up now and then and do something else, like this.

Those beans are particularly beautiful and, like the chard, they will be planted in double quantities next year.

 

The saffron was an afterthought – it was just silverside, beans, onions, garlic, courgettes, carrots and marjoram, with a bayleaf. But I have just been thinking about a recipe my father got from La Pistollera, a Spanish Civil War fighter, who came once to our kitchen and cooked her calamari with saffron.

If food is not your bag, you may derive a random satisfaction this picture of Osman Pasha, an Ottoman general, instead: