blood orange gin sparkler

   

I have bought three new recipe books in the last week. This is an issue, as we have run out of shelf, and John stubbornly refuses to throw away any of his recipe books to make way for mine: very unreasonable, I’m sure you will agree. No? We will probably be able to find a small corner of our library lounge to stack them in, somewhere, but I should have known better than to pick up a copy of Polpo in a bookshop last weekend. It flopped open, obligingly (it opens flat! the excitement!), on a recipe for blood orange and Campari cake. Of course, now I have to have it. I knew this would happen.

I’d not tried Campari before – it is not widely ordered at pubs in Bath, after all, and looks just a little alarming to the uninitiated – but I kept coming across references to it (along with its milder cousin Aperol) written by people whose taste has yet to fail me, and so I finally plucked up the courage to order a Negroni a couple of weeks ago. Now I am hooked. The first taste was a little alarming – Campari is a bitters, after all, and I’ve not found very many mentions of it that don’t also include the word ‘medicinal’ – but I am easily sold on a gin-based cocktail, and after the first sip the palate adjusts and the bitterness of the Campari is tempered nicely by the sweetness of the Martini. That’s what I think, anyway, but the faces of the few people who’ve had a sip of what I’m drinking might persuade you otherwise.

pommes parmentier

This might be a potato-heavy week, everyone. Firstly, I have to tell you about my favourite thing to do with potatoes, and then tomorrow I’m having my second favourite potato thing (at which point it will promptly become my first favourite – I can be very fickle), which I also feel strongly that you should know about. I would apologise, but I happen to really like potatoes, and I refuse to believe that the whole world doesn’t share my views. (This also applies to many other things, not just potatoes, but that’s by the by.) After all, what reasonable person could walk past a plate of potato skins roasted to a crisp and loaded with cheese and bacon and not take just a tiny one? The same sort of a person that passes the gratin dauphinoise dish around the table without taking a spoonful, that’s who: frankly, very suspicious.

I do intend to make myself you a cake in between, though, partly so that you don’t desert me in favour of less starch-laden climes, and also partly because I have been thinking about very little else for over a week now, which says very little in favour of my time management skills. In my defence, I did spend most of Saturday miles up a hill in the mist chopping down hawthorn, and then the rest of the time since then pulling inch-long thorns out of places that should perhaps have been better protected from them. That is my excuse.