Magic beans
Here they are: our favourite beans. We could eat these beans for breakfast, lunch and supper and we would never tire of them: that is, pretty much, the universal household sentiment.
She’s like a cold coffee…
Iced coffee. It’s not hard. When I was growing up, there was always a jar of it in the fridge, the remains of the morning’s pot. Probably that doesn’t go down too well with the cold-brew crowd, but it worked for my Mom.
The right stuff
Now, nuts are a good snack, right? Theo likes nuts. Trouble is, he likes KP nuts, which are, let’s say, pretty salty. (Interesting, however, that when you click on “Nutritional information” on KP’s website you’ll only get told how good for you nuts are: not how much salt is in each serving. It’s too small to read on the packet. Answer: every 50g serving — that’s not a lot — contains 12 per cent of an adult’s recommended salt intake.)
In the mix
My Dad was famous for his pancakes. How famous? Well, famous in our house, and that was famous enough for all of us. The pancake ritual was an important part of my growing up: my Dad was a firm believer in “silver dollar” pancakes — his were a little bigger than the coin in question, but not much — and so the first time, as a kid, I ordered pancakes in a diner and got a stack as wide as my face, well, it was quite a shock, I can tell you.
Theo wants chicken pie
When are you going to make chicken pie again? asks my son. No time like the present, I say. Chicken pie in our house is a scratch affair: we are not afraid of ready made pastry or, indeed, a bit of stock from a bottle.
Eggzactly
I’m trying to kick the kitchen-gadget habit; but a couple of weeks ago in Paris, killing time on the rue d’Assas, I couldn’t resist the above, which you can find here. It’s an egg poacher for the microwave, and I’m smitten. Scramble up an egg in a bowl with a little spoonful of cream or creme fraiche (or, heck, Boursin or cream cheese), salt and pepper, and some little dots of butter. Dab a little oil inside the silicone pot; slide in your egg and pop on the cover; give it 30 seconds in the micro (mine’s 800w)and check what you’ve got; you might need to stir it and give it another 10 seconds. A perfect coddled egg, no boiling water necessary. Breakfast!
30 years of Complicite
About halfway through an intense, two and a half hour talk with Simon McBurney, Complicite’s artistic director tells a story for which he apologises. “You probably don’t have time for this,” he says, warning of a digression; and yet, when I leave the North London café where we met — feeling just a little battered by the waves of impassioned talk that have washed over me in the course of a morning — I find myself thinking that this so-called digression is a perfect expression of what Complicite is and what it means.
William Boyd on James Bond
It’s a cold day in November; winter has just swept in. I’ve made my way past the glitter of the King’s Road to a cozy house in Chelsea. Here, a fire blazes in the grate of a sitting room piled with books, its walls hung with elegant modern art, its tables set about with family photographs. But let’s imagine: what if nothing was as it seems? “You can’t live without trust,” William Boyd says simply.
Ken Burns on The Dust Bowl — and “the Ken Burns effect”
Perhaps you think you’ve never heard of Ken Burns. But if you’ve ever been to a wedding, say, and watched a montage of photographs where the camera seems to pan in and around the still images, creating the illusion of movement, you’re watching what’s called “the Ken Burns effect”. And in every Apple computer for the past decade you’ll find the effect available in iMovie. “It’s saved countless millions of bar mitzvahs, vacations and weddings from descending into boredom,” Burns laughs as we talk on the phone. He’s in Boston and has agreed to speak to me at 6.30am — his time — so busy are this film-maker’s days. He says he knows what he’s doing pretty much every day up to 2019.
The lost art of letter-writing
In the summer of 1979 I had been packed off to camp in Maine, where the licence plates all say Vacationland and where I’ve never been so miserable, before or since. I was 11. My sufferings (you can imagine, right? I was the kid who hated team sports and longed for it to pour with rain so I could sit on my bunk and read) were exacerbated because my parents were spending that summer in England, a country I loved — a country I hoped I might live in one day, if I was very lucky indeed.