» Listings for 2015

1. THE RUNNY BUTTERNUT SQUASH SOUP - AND A RESCUE BY RICE

   Posted on 6:35pm Wednesday 4th Mar 2015

   

   Back in the autumn, I acquired two very large, bullet-hard butternut squashes from a fellow craft market trader. I decided to make them into soup, so spent a good hour peeling, deseeding and chopping them up. Into a large saucepan they went, with almost enough water to cover, and they were cooked until tender.

   The mistake was to not drain them before blitzing. It didn’t look like that much water, and I was keen to flavour the soup with some excellent chicken stock nicely jellied in the fridge. In that went too, along with allspice, nutmeg and cinnamon, salt and black pepper and a skoosh of double cream. Great flavour, lovely silky texture – but hopelessly thin. Disappointedly, I boxed it, consigned it to the freezer, and avoided dealing with it until the other day.

   Reluctant to chuck out something with such good ingredients, and which took some work to generate, I thawed it out over two days, then transferred it to a pan and reheated it very gently, wondering how I could make something of it. It was still very thin, although the aroma coming off it was seductive. I didn’t want to use flour as a thickener as it would wreck the silky texture which is half the fun of eating it. Mashed potato would do the same.

   Put some rice in, my husband suggested from behind his fly tying vice.

   I hadn’t thought of rice. I put a handful in, stirred it and went away, not convinced it would do the trick. But it did. After about an hour, the starch had come out of the rice and thickened the soup just enough; the flavour was still really good and the texture was intact.

   All it needs is some homemade bread, and optional grated cheese.

   If you decide to have a go, remember to drain the squash of its cooking liquid before adding the chicken stock.

2. ON MURDERING YOUR DARLINGS

   Posted on 8:27pm Sunday 25th Jan 2015

   ON MURDERING YOUR DARLINGS

   On this, the official publication day of my first book, I was reminded of John Steinbeck’s quote, which I will have to paraphrase as I haven’t seen it in print for over thirty years. It runs something like this: “On the day I was praised for my work, I looked back over what I had done; that day, I made nothing new.”

   For some reason, that quote has stuck in my head for the whole of my writing career – if you dwell on the good writing already accomplished, you aren’t creating, you’re smugging.

   Well, that’s no good. So today, I was determined to do something creative, and, thanks to a revelatory conversation with my daughter Harriet, achieved an immensely therapeutic, giant step forward for the writing of my current Work in Progress (WIP).

   This book has been in the making, on and off – mostly off, to tell the truth - for eleven years now. The main problem, throughout all the writing, has been the structure. Chatting with Harriet this afternoon, we agreed that the problem with the structure was a single element of the content, which seemed to go off at a tangent to the rest of the book. In the face of this diagnosis, I hesitated; to remove this element would be to murder several warped, weird darlings who worked rather well together.

   How long is that section? Harriet asked. Hang on, I said, I’ll block it and check the word count. I was expecting it to be around 20K words, but it was actually almost 40K – almost half a book in its own right, and almost a third of the current WIP’s 140K length.

   There’s your problem, Harriet said. It’s another book. It shouldn’t be there!

   When I cut and pasted the text to a new document, my WIP shrank to 101K – but there was a newborn next to it, already half-grown. So I didn’t exactly murder my darlings, just put them on ice. Performing major surgery turned a book with two heads into two books with a head apiece.

   There is nothing so slippery as a WIP – it’s a large, unpredictable organism with many arms, legs and working parts, and can sprawl in all directions, or slither out of your grasp altogether  if you haven’t got a good grip on it. That grip is the structure. Today, I remembered a valuable lesson – pick up the red pen, or sharpen your delete button, and regularly subject your WIP to a good, hard-eyed hack. Writing a book is not a sentimental process of creation, it’s a ruthless act of ensuring the survival of the fittest - the best characters, the best storylines, the best language – while anything lame, boring, repetitive or not working, gets the chop. Sometimes, a writer has to create with one hand, and be a bit of a serial killer with the other.