Tomorrow is the first of September and with the change in the weather over recent days, suddenly what was reading as scorched leaves in the trees and grass on the roadside is looking like a fast forward into autumn. The element of the new landscape that causes the most disconnection with past frames of reference is the new green growth that has shot up beneath the closely shorn hay in the fields, but what a relief that must be for grazing herds of sheep, cattle, goats, horses and most other wildlife. It’s confusing losing the seasonal changes we’ve all grown up with, the increasingly hot and sunny summers with the suddenly wet and windy late Augusts drawing summer to an abrupt end. But when I checked the forecast just now I see we will be back up to the mid 20s next weekend, so the confusion continues.

It has been delightful to have some rain though, hasn’t it? And to feel a cool, damp breeze through the window at night after months of stillness and heat.

Yesterday my mind turned to tulips and I shall be treating myself to some bulbs later today. I grew some for the first time this year and loved and enjoyed them a lot more than I was expecting to. They also had a much longer flowering moment than I had anticipated, changing their colour and bloom over days and weeks as you can see from the pictures above. I will definitely be purchasing more of this type, not for me the single, simple tulip or the raggedy parrot style, I love these peony like ones that give of themselves so generously and travel through so many different manifestations.

This week I grounded myself in the kitchen by making chicken stock from the bones of 60 free range thighs I filleted for a job on Wednesday for a new client - I’m pleased to say another organisation rooted in agriculture with a focus on environmentalism and the combat of climate collapse. I don’t enjoy butchery, but knowing that I was using the bones for stock helped as it stopped me worrying about my slightly lazy and inefficient technique. One hour and forty five minutes in the pressure cooker with some bay, peppercorns, star anise, celery, carrots and onions and I now have eight 500ml pots of rich, wobbly stock in the freezer ready for autumn dishes of broth and beans, noodles and vegetables. I have never taken the time to make vegetable stock, but I would like to, I assume that celery, carrots and onions would be foundational for the flavour and perhaps some garlic and ginger, then I get a little lost as to what to add - fennel might be too overwhelming in flavour, would parsnips dominate with too much sweetness? Other vegetables would, I assume be rendered flavourless mush after prolonged cooking - does anyone reading have any recommendations? Parsley and thyme feel like good additions, bay goes without saying as does black pepper…

There has been much cooking this week and much need for grounding with more frightening news of devastation. Living in a death cult is brutal, not allowing it to brutalise a constant challenge. I’ve been cheered this morning by looking at the footage of Carnival on my phone. I grew up in Kensal Rise at the top of Ladbroke Grove and from the age of about 16 would religiously go to carnival every year. It’s been a long while since I’ve been and I miss it.

The recipe below is for a salad I have made a few times recently for clients, which suits this moment of slightly confusing seasonal change. The squash are ripening and soon our markets will be full of them. You can swap out the squash for a combination of roasted roots if you like - carrots, parsnips and beetroot make good companions. When I make a salad with this trio I keep the beetroot separate till the last moment, purely for aesthetic reasons, as I like the white and orange to shine out against the deep purple of the beetroot. Mix them together too soon and everything becomes pink. I tend to dress and season the carrots and parsnips, mixing them together with any herbs or leaves I’m adding and then plate up, piling the beetroot in the middle and on top to bring it to the table, giving everything a last stir up just before serving.

It is so desperately unfair that the countries that contribute the least carbon into our shared atmosphere are the ones who will suffer first and hardest from the symptoms of climate collapse. It is a further brutal blow of empire building and colonialism, that many of the countries that were dominated and stolen from in the building of empires will new suffer further devastation thanks to the thoughtless and self serving actions of those same dominating powers. Meanwhile the thieving wealth hoarders reinforce their borders against what is known to be coming, the inevitable rise in climate refugees. It all gets increasingly hard to manage psychologically, I hope that you are managing to maintain a sense of calm and sanity - any tips shared in the comments will be gratefully received!

As an exercise in hopefulness and support I will be making a donation to the Government of Nepal’s disaster relief fund - I have seen a number of requests online that this be the place monies are sent as there are a number of fake funds that have been set up. Here are a few other things that have helped to distract me and have given hope.

The Essay is a series on Radio 3 that I fell upon by accident on the BBC Sounds app. I have broken sleep and rely on listening to things to help quiet my mind so that I can drift back off. The 15 minute length of these episodes is ideal and the subject matter is wonderfully diverse and interesting, also (so far) soothing and gentle. It is billed as ‘Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.’

The recent winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize ‘May We Feed The King’ by Rebecca Perry kept being recommended and I am flying through it. Beautifully written and thoroughly absorbing.

The BBC’s Sewing Bee continues to delight, while I know it has its detractors over the shifting format and increasingly ‘game show’ style I don’t mind. I love Patrick and Esme and all the makers, I find it moving and very much appreciate the emotional enthusiasm and vulnerability that is often on show. It has also helped to encourage me to pick up my knitting needles after a brief break, and I’m very much enjoying making my striped cardigan, which shall hopefully be ready for Autumn.

Gentle planning for the back to school season. I’m booked to return to the Monday morning writing classes led by Holly Dawson at Charleston that I have been enjoying for a few terms now. It feels excellent to have committed to starting my weeks with two hours formal writing practice. What I want to write about has taken a big shift of late and I look forward to finding out where it’s leading.

I am also hoping to visit the V&A in London soon to see the Schiaparelli exhibition with dear friends who I studied with. They are the perfect exhibition companions, we wander the rooms sometimes congregating, more often off in our own reverie. We all have birthdays in October, how has it come around so quickly? I am gutted to have missed the Marilyn Monroe exhibition at the Portrait Gallery, but am channelling this disappointment into an active enthusiasm to not miss other things!

On Saturday I am trading for the first time at Eastbourne Farmers Market, which takes place outside the Towner Art Gallery from 9am till 1pm. Perhaps you could combine an exhibition visit with a little food shopping, combining a cultural lift with supporting your local hub economy, it’s sure to make a positive and hope filled start to the weekend!

I hope that you enjoy the recipe below, do let me know if you ever make it. Thank you for reading and subscribing if you do. There’s a button below if you don’t yet but would like to.

With love & hope,

Chloe x

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Last week I made up my largest wholesale order of spices to date – 7 whole kilograms, or 7,000 grams as I prefer to think of it - it was a lot! Producing it involved much multiplication of blend recipes and head scratching, and a little ironic purchasing of organic spices from the organic food shop that the order was for in order to complete said order. Ah, the exciting day to day of running a micro food business.

Or at least micro food business done the Seven Sisters’ Spices way.

There was a moment during the toasting, grinding and blending where I had a pot of freshly ground raw cardamom to one side of me and a pot of freshly ground raw fennel to the other and goodness me but do they sing well together. I had a moment of wistfulness at the thought of spending a day alone with some cardamom and fennel, perhaps a little lemon and rose, maybe some pink pepper, definitely some salt crystals. Playing with flavour and recipe development - pure joy.

In 12 years of spiced product making the range of items I offer has barely changed. This is not through a lack of ambition or inspiration, simply a lack of time. As I approach my 54^th birthday and the world turns towards another year of extreme heat and harvest devastation, more and more things are telling me to pivot, pivot again and pivot now. And so I continue in my ambitions to have a life of less hustle and more creativity, as so many of us do. I hope to find a steady form of employment that I can side hustle my spices, teaching and writing from, with occasional catering, rather than the current merry-go-round of hustle from one job to the next, squeezing markets in between and teaching workshops when I can (speaking of which I have 4 places left in the autumn term, paid subscribers use your discount code for 10% off, please email me if you don’t have the code).

On Saturday I was trading at the delightful Florence Road Market and it was a predictably quiet August market Saturday. I had batches of all of my products, all 20 of them, and despite the relative quiet I had a good day. Florence Road is blessed with a core of committed and regular customers, you may find it surprising, but in all my many years market trading in Sussex this is very much the exception, not the rule. My years living in London as a Farmers Market customer felt very different, and I hope that this continues to be the case – London markets are busy and people shop strong, making those markets not dissimilar in feel to the ones found in much of mainland Europe. Let’s take France as our leading example. In France there is a centuries long and unbroken tradition of shopping at market, it is imbedded into the culture of, dare I claim most communities – please correct me if I am wrong. In this country we lack this hard commitment to market shopping. As Lucie, the cheesemonger I trade next to observed recently, in France everyone goes to market and then gets on with their day. In this country, or at least our experience in Sussex, is that should the day be particularly fine or notably not, then people will simply do something else. Market in itself is a lifestyle choice, an activity rather than a necessity “shall we go to the market?” “no, let’s go to the beach”.

I read somewhere on social media recently that if we want to live in village like communities then we need to start to behave like villagers. It might seem like an obvious statement but I found it helpful to read. It’s one thing to want something, quite another to make it happen. I believe this principle works both in a social respect and an economic one. In order for hub economies and local businesses to thrive and for communities to grow strong, then all the aspects of industry that are undertaken locally need to be supported. Shopping at your local food market is an excellent way of living this ethos for real. Buy your food from the people who grew it, made it or at least bought it direct from the producer. It honestly shocks and disappoints me how very few people actually do this as a regular way to buy the food that they eat. I know that financial considerations limit a lot of peoples access to these markets, but actually if you are reticent and hesitant on that score, go and have a look, you might be surprised at the cost, particularly at this time of year. And goodness but does it all taste better than anything you will get in the supermarket – and it will certainly be cheaper and tastier than anything organic you can buy in a supermarket. Yes, I concede that it is not an option readily open to all, but perhaps if the markets were better patronised then it would become so…

Part of me doubts that there is much of a future for the food produce market in this country, but I do hope that I am wrong. Increasingly food markets are about street food and food based experiences of that nature, rather than piles of seasonal vegetables, fresh baked goods, eggs, cheese, milk, oils, fruit, teas, coffee, jams and spices. It will be terribly sad if we loose them. Find yours and go visit. Even if you simply buy a loaf of bread and a box of eggs, you will be positively impacting your local food systems and living a little more like a villager.

Here’s a recipe for a sambal I knocked together to go with my last Friday Food Delivery menu, which was Sri Lankan in inspiration. I always offer a condiment alongside the main dish, carb and side that the standard meal comprises of and it’s often my favourite thing to make. It is where you can really play with flavour to knit together the other dishes on the table, adding something tangy, sour, spicy and sharp to enhance and draw together the other plates. This will keep for 2-3 days in the fridge and will go with a surprising amount of things. I enjoyed some with an omelette one lunch time, it would be great with some roasted vegetables, tofu or meat and fish. I served it with wet curries for my Friday Food, there are no limits to its’ versatility.

Chloe x

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Cucumbers are delicious at this time of year too, when you can buy organic slow grown ones, not the watery tasteless things tightly wrapped in plastic in the supermarkets. My cucumbers are faring less well than my tomatoes sadly, I think it has just been too hot and dry for them. I have so far cropped only one, perhaps it’s the scarcity that made it so damned delicious? It had the texture of melon and so much flavour, sweet but not the honeyed sweetness of melon, more musky and cooling, I had an argument with my partner when he tossed the last inch of it to the dog.

Later today I will prepare dinner with a vast bounty of tomatoes, some courgettes and some simply beautiful finger aubergines, pictured below, what stunners they are. They are thinner skinned compared to standard aubergines and so much more digestible, at least I find them to be. I am very gut aware at the moment, as ever, but particularly so with all that is swirling around in the news, my stress belly – worry guts – are proving very reactive.

I came on here not knowing what to write, conscious that this newsletter is themed around Hope and Food and it feeling trite to talk much about either while still reeling from the devastating news of Jason Arday’s death, struggling with the burden of truth that yet another milestone in our shared existence that takes the form of the death of a black skinned human will likely pass without the shift in consciousness we so desperately need society as a whole to have. Steven Lawrence, the subsequent Macpherson report, Grenfell Tower, Joy Gardner, Olaseni Lewis, Rashan Charles, the entire Black Lives Matter movement in the states – there are so very many other names and instances to list, just in the last few decades, too many to mention but I mean no disrespect in not doing so. What will it take for people to do the work of rooting out their internalised prejudices so that we can all strive to live happily and equally together? Anyone who claims that the hounding of Jason Arday was not racially motivated is both wrong and racist. I wonder how many lost subscribers that assertion will lead to? If you are tempted, try to read on before you go, try to open your mind a little, please.

The same refusal to interrogate other instances of prejudice and harm are evident in the media and governments attitudes towards Epstein et al, climate collapse and data centres, the rise in trans hate, hostility towards asylum seekers and refugees. It’s all part of the same toxic melting pot, all part of maintaining the supremacist status quo.

It makes my head and heart scream, looking at the injustice of the media frenzy and hounding that Jason Arday was subjected to. Had he not died, we would still be being bombarded with details today. The sense of horror and pain and fury within the black British community was palpable when the news broke of his death on Saturday. While listening to Radio 6 on Saturday, Jam Supernova opened her show with a Rebel MC track ‘Black Meaning Good’ and I cried because of the message in the song, particularly the Malocolm X sample at the beginning, and because I knew why she played it.

I grew up in a house where the Guardian was bought and read every day by both my parents. As a young child I was mesmerised by the dense text and vast pages (this was the era of broad sheets) and would long to understand what all these words meant that kept my parents so engrossed.

Fast forward to adulthood and after years of managing to read the paper myself, I stopped reading the Guardian and its sister paper the Observer about 20 years ago. I’d noticed a slow sea change, a steering towards the centre, an increasingly dominant privately educated, upper middle class voice. I remember vividly the two articles that caused me to stop buying them altogether - a Saturday Guardian Family section letter from a reader asking for tips on how best to invest their child benefit payments. Soon after the Observer ran an early ‘how to reduce your carbon footprint’ piece, two bits of advice I shall always remember and not because of their usefulness - stop using your patio heater and throw away your wine fridge, use your cellar instead. They were not speaking to me anymore.

I urge you to boycott the mainstream press.

White supremacy functions via a hierarchy of wealth and power - at the top are the billionaires. Who owns the mainstream press? Yes, that’s right. Stop giving them your money. Render their advertising revenue non existent. Cancel any subscriptions to their digital manifestations. Give your money to some of the new and upcoming independent news channels who rely on crowd funding and public support rather than tech bro dollars to produce their work. Remain vigilant too, as none of these sources are necessarily infallible. I have recently learnt that Novara media is far from what it purports to be and have unfollowed accordingly. There is a list below of some channels you may find interesting.

I have said it before and I will say it here again, the society that we live in has its roots in the enslavement of black Africans and the brutal land theft and genocides that came with the expansion of empire, which still continues to this day. The reality of this blood soaked history is a dark shame and guilt, a fear, a revulsion at the heart of British whiteness and so at the heart of the British establishment. This stain manifests as racism. This racism causes scenarios like the one that we have just seen end in the needless death of a talented black man, regardless of the accusations made against him, a Dr, professor, father, partner, brother, whose diagnosis of autism was known to make him vulnerable to just this outcome, something the media were warned about but chose to disregard with the most tragic consequence. They simply didn’t care. They didn’t let it get between them and a click bait heavy, rage enflaming ‘story’. The media in this country feeds on this internalised shadow held in the hearts of so many British people, it is a sickness in our society, the only way to cleanse it, to heal it is for a full acknowledgement of this brutal past to be made. While I am hopeful that this will one day come to pass, I am not necessarily hopeful that I will live to see it. That will not stop me from writing, talking, singing and shouting about it.

During an interview with Jason Arday for his podcast ‘Ways to Change the World’ Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked “If you could change the world in any way, how would you change it?” to which Jason replied

“I would take a thread and a needle and I’d interweave love into our society. That’s what I would do. I think the absence of love in our society is absolutely palpable.

I feel like the empathy we have for one another, it’s completely eroded, you know, and there is so much anger in society.”

Hear the whole interview here.

How tragic for all of us that Jason Arday is no longer alive to do this work of love stitching, what better way to honour his name than to take up that needle and thread ourselves. Arday’s memoir Great And Unfortunate Things is due to be published later this year, pre order it from local, independent, black owned bookshop Afrori Books here. Below is a list of alternative news outlets that I enjoy, I have put their Instagram links as all of their bios on that platform have links to all of their online manifestations – you don’t have to be on Instagram to read and support them.

With love and hope,

Chloe x

Novo

News Chord

The Nerve News

Double Down News

We are on holiday, me, him and the hound, in Cornwall where I’ve come since the year I was born. Staying in the house my mum grew up in and enjoying the same walks and beaches. While much has changed, much stays resolutely the same.

The walks up from the two beaches remain steep and arduous for children who have played long and hard all day in the sun, sea and sand. I always empathise with any dramatic displays of exhaustion we witness on those steep beach roads. My grandparents never drove and when me and my brother would stay with them, brought down by my mum at the beginning of the holidays on the train and left to be collected two weeks hence by her and my dad in the car, beach days were rare and would often end with exhausted walking. I remember well treading sandy feet on the soft smooth of the double yellow lines on the road that leads from Trevaunance Cove, up that first steep incline, polystyrene body board flapping awkwardly, all scratchy sand under my arm ‘please can we get a taxi?’ which we did sometimes, but often not.

And then a new family moved onto Beacon Road and my clever gran Cornwall had spotted that the children were mine and my brothers age and introduced herself and then us and so we met our beloved Ben and his boys Jan and Leo and dogs Woody, a collie and Arlo, a yellow lab’. Ben kept goats and chickens and ducks and used wooden plates. He was the town postman and drove an orange VW camper and surfed and had moved to Cornwall after being a merchant seaman and seeing surfers in South Africa and falling for the sport. Ben was with my Gran when she was in pain and waited with her for the ambulance that took her on her last journey. When Google maps photography plans were announced, Ben went out into the field and mowed a CND sign large enough to be viewed from the air. Ben was the first and most genuinely peace loving environmentalist I ever knew, he is sadly no longer with us though we think of him and talk about him often and we’re meeting up with Leo on Sunday as we always try to do when we’re down.

Bens house sits next to a big field (the aforementioned) that he would tend for the owners. Each summer stay would begin with us reinstating the camp we would build in the hedgerow, next to a small tree that grew there and many years later found to be above a mine shaft, as so much is up here on the beacon. A very early memory - lying in the long hay of the field with Leo, watching the camp which had been taken over by our elder brothers, we’d been sent off with the challenge to recapture it from them if we could. The only tool Leo and I had were my blue plastic binoculars which we used to watch Roly and Jan who had pen knives AND crash helmets. “It’s not fair that they’ve got the camp and crash helmets and pen knives and all we’ve got is these toy binoculars” me and Leo agreed as we watched them sitting high in the branches of the tree that over shadowed the hedgerow camp, wearing their crash helmets and striking splinters off sticks with their knives.

Days used to last so long back then. We would fill time with bicycling, camp building, the ever most popular beach days - that one time when Ben took us all to Perranporth for the day, 4 miles up the coast and as we were packing up the camper van, Woody came running along the road towards us, he would follow his family when he could but this was the furthest yet. Much laughing amazement at the day long adventure Woody must have had.

I miss the pace of life in the late 1970s. The limited time that TV was available. The joy in a packet of felt tips and a poster sized colouring in. Reading my way through books. Making mud pies in the garden and biscuits in the kitchen. Sitting for hours on the gate posts on the day when finally my parents would be coming with the car and all the holiday excitement that symbolised. The summer when we had been promised Rubik’s Cubes, we were so excited. The contrast between the doing and the fun and the lazing about getting agonisingly bored. I have lost the ability to be bored. I miss it.

Cliff and Margaret Tyrell, my grandparents, she an Edinburgh Scot born in India, he from Jamaica the ancestor of African slaves, a mixed marriage in 1947 who raised a mixed child in Cornwall through the 1950s, although granddad was largely absent in London, working in his art studio in Chelsea to limited professional success despite his talents. Much to reflect on and write about here.

About a year ago I had a DNA test done because I wanted to know where in Africa my ancestors had come from. It returned some surprises, the biggest being my 52% Swedish DNA - who knew?! And an emotional response to Sierra Leone, which I hadn’t anticipated, a known acceptance of Nigeria, which I had, and confusion over Kenya - what, when? How did my Kenyan DNA reach my west African ancestors? In Africa generations ago? Or in America or the Caribbean? It threw up more questions than it gave answers to.

Since then I have had a tattoo done (pictured above) of a sketch of my grandfathers. It is a small landscape detail from a larger illustration he did as part of a body of work called Africa ABC. He was commissioned by the home office during the war to do a series of illustrations to promote the war effort to the colonies. Having never travelled to Africa I like to think that he referenced memories of Jamaica in the hut and trees. He never went home after coming here in 1936 to take up a scholarship at Central School of Art. He had been an artist and political cartoonist for the Jamaican Gleaner, the national newspaper.

I love having my grandfathers sketch on my arm. I never felt close to him, he was a mysterious presence, scarred I suspect by the racism he experienced, he was very committed to his faith in the Lord, which I found alienating and distancing. I wish I had taken time to try to know him. But there is a constancy in family members that can lead you to not appreciating all that they encompass until they are no longer around to properly interrogate.

The little hut of a house that my Gran brought in 1947 is much changed now. Where before most of the windows faced inland, the weather coming in from the sea being blocked out by the blind back, opening the back door to gather coal or fling out the ashes from the Raeburn and oh, the Atlantic. Now the back of the house has large French windows that gaze out over the view all day long, although this being high on the beacon the view often doesn’t reach the garden hedge, when the cloud is low and full of moisture. I wonder what Cliff and Margaret would make of the space now, epic in its proportions relative to the smallness of the rooms when they lived here. Much as I love the new layout I miss revisiting the house proper that I spent so much time in as a child and then teenager, when I would come on my own on the train for visits. I’m lying in the bath at the moment, in what was the front room. The original tiny bathroom has been swallowed up in the open plan living space. The three bedrooms remain as they once were, more or less. But the decoration and furniture is all changed. And of course the atmosphere has shifted with the shifting of walls and opening up of windows. I still like to think of my mum spotting the smoke from the train that would take her into school, rising visibly as it made its approach to the village station, long since gone, and signalling that she had just enough time to run down over the fields to catch it.

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In lieu of new recipes and food thoughts, below are links to some of my favourite recipe shares already sent out via Substack to serve as inspiration and also as a gentle reminder that there are lots here for you to look through, the index I have made here is a good place to start. A reminder too that you can search my entire archive with keywords using the search bar - I use it all the time to find recipes I would like to cook again, it is most useful.

While I holiday without pay I have been grateful for a workshop booking and for last nights purchase of 2 pop up supper club tickets. Paid subscribers - do get in touch if you would like the 10% discount codes for both workshops and September’s Pop Up Supper, if you have received them already they will still work. All subscribers welcome to book, particularly at the moment! You will find details of the last few workshop places here and the last 6 Pop Up Supper spots here. I shall be back delivering Friday Food on August 14th.

Happy cooking,

Chloe x

Too many to name but none quite as hot or as early or as silent in its absence of bees.

The tree is filing this era away as the one crop time. The waving, rattling rows of barley, a view of green, then gold, then a yellow muddied and darkened by the exposed dry earth after the crops have been gathered. It’s been some seasons since the tree saw the crackle of smoke and low flame before the view was rendered black as pitch by stubble fires.

This is a lonely era. Increasingly so. The tree remembers best the time of the commons, when men and women, short and tall, would come and there would be cows and sheep and so very many different plants grown. And the livestock brought their stench and flies and the ground was verdant and vibrant and the water table that sat at the foot of the trees roots was ample and cool where now it has all but gone. With the rich, stinking soil came flowers who brought the bees and the butterflies who in turn lured the small birds who tempted the carrion and the hawks. Mice would rustle through in the evenings and squirrels would scamper amongst the old trees branches. Owls would come in the dark of night and bats and a hunting and a screeching would echo around the dark. And there were foxes and deer, great stags whose hot breath made wreaths of smoke around their flared nostrils in the colder months when snow would fall and settle and hush.

It is harder now for the old oak to commune with its fellows. It knows they are still there, it is not the same as the great felling when so many of its sapling siblings were lost to axe and saw. But where once there was a chatter there is now a hush. Where once there was an endless layering of sounds now it’s mostly the rush and rattle of wind through reeds and the thrum of an engine and a plane and sometimes a pigeon or a crow, sometimes.

Standing on platform 2 of Lewes station enjoying the relative cool of the hour, it being 7.14am. The train before mine has been cancelled and the platform is filling. I’ve closed my eyes to face the sun, to draw down calm but also to avoid the many flashing faces that whir by. The problem with my line of work is I meet a lot of people. The problem with my time of life is I don’t tend to remember who many of them are.

My brain is very like this at the moment. A combination of peri-menopause, mid life preoccupations, an ailing parent, a distant child, a micro food business constantly teetering on the edge economic collapse, the world readying itself (or not) for environmental catastrophe. It’s no wonder that the machinations of my grey matter have been compromised. And please don’t forget the heat.

As I stood with my eyes closed to the sun my brain flip flopped between moments to come in the day ahead and days in the now quite far past, when I used to regularly stand on platform two waiting for a London bound train. Back then I would have been dressed differently. Hard soled brogues instead of sandals. Tailored trousers and an ironed shirt. But I was lucky to never have to be this early. Working with students as in-class access meant I worked to college time, first sessions of the day typically starting around 10.30 and so I was able to drop the kids at school and nip to get the 8.55, a considerably more affordable train than the 07.24 that I am currently sitting on.

Now I’m thinking further into the future than what the day holds. I’m making plans to clear some shelf space in the basement at home to start a small food and bottled water stock pile. I’m remembering that we have two freezers down there from when I was selling ready meals at market and so I can stockpile some batch cooked items too. And some fresh vegetables and fruit - this is where I have my greatest anxiety. I am regretful that I have given over so much of my kitchen garden to flowers this year. Although I am grateful every day that I am there for the floral abundance.

It’s hitting 45 degrees in France. Lots of people are heading there and further still for their holidays, where once this would have given me a wistful pang, now it makes me shudder at the thought. Not simply the thought of being on holiday in those temperatures but the thought of the closeness geographically to ourselves and the inevitability that we will soon be hitting temperatures like that, indeed already have. And I think about the working populations in Asia and Africa, the southern states of America. I think about our daughter, moving into summer in Sydney, Australia, where they have that big hole in the ozone layer.

Last night I found a local screening of the National Emergency Briefing in Hailsham in September. This is the film that Ed Miliband said the government would not promote widespread screening of, because there is no plan to address the issues raised and so it would only cause alarm. As a friend said on social media, it’s like the film ‘Don’t Look Up’. Only it’s not fiction and it won’t all be over in one big bang, unfortunately.

My brain flutters again and thinks about how there is a definite shift in my thought process from limiting environmental impact to preparing for environmental impact. How futile it feels to recycle and compost and not fly when America, Israel and Russia drop massive filthy bombs onto people and planet on a daily basis.

Let us imagine a hopeful scenario.

I think of a world where….

Meta glasses prove to be the tipping point for the masses. They are shit and pointless, unless you are a state government that wants infinite surveillance possibilities. I read just yesterday that kids in America are wearing them to school and vlogging their whole day. However, also last week Meta had to roll back the feature they had added to their platforms which allowed everyone and anyone to take everyone and anyone’s images from their profiles and use AI to manipulate them. Apparently it proved to be extremely unpopular - imagine! You will notice, if you haven’t already, that Meta are going full hard sell on their charming spectacles, with a particular focus on selling to women. They’ve recruited some of the hyper rich and ‘famous’ to endorse them, a Kardashian or is it a Jenner? They need women to embrace more of tech because women lead 80% of consumerism. The tech bros have invested so heavily in all this shit, unfortunately for them it is literally shit and people aren’t buying it as they’d hoped.

I’ve been travelling up and down to London a fair bit over the last two weeks while my mum recovers from spinal surgery. I first went up on July 7th and thought nothing of getting out at Russell Square tube to get to the hospital until I saw the flowers and the book of remembrance which triggered the memory of July 7th 2005 and the London bombings. It caused me a niggling twinge of anxiety travelling on the tube later that day and brought back a memory of a conversation with a friend about survivors of the bombing and one who had been reading a funny book when the explosion happened and so found laughing triggering for their trauma. As I worked through my anxiety spike I thought that closed eyes might be best, so as to avoid having anything to trigger memories except then I realised that closing your eyes would do just that and one might never sleep again.

It feels a little like governments are closing their eyes to avoid the panic, or at least trying to close all of our eyes to it.

I have wandered from the hope point…

This weeks Becoming the People podcast is a lovely listen, it being an interview between Prentis Hemphill and Megan Falley entitled All That Mattered. Megan is the widow of poet Andrea Gibson who died a year ago. You can read Andrea’s Substack Things That Don’t Suck that Megan continues to write, it is full of love and hope.

Books I have recently enjoyed, incase you are looking for summer reading recommendations…

I am currently reading The Names by Florence Knapp, which looks at the 3 different timelines in a families life, based on the 3 available choices for naming a new born son - what a difference a name makes.

On The Calculation Of Volume by Solvej Balle is a 5 part read loosely about a woman who keeps reliving the same day over and over, each volume covering 365 days of October 18th. It is about everything and nothing and hugely compelling. I have paused at the end of volume 3 as volume 5 does not come out in the UK until November, it is still being translated from the original Norwegian.

Hekate The Witch by Nikita Gill is an epic poem telling of Hekates journey through the underworld amongst the waring Titans and Olympians. It’s about war and family and tradition and grief, amongst much else. Nikita Gill has recently been excellent on Instagram taking down the far right’s furious and nonsensical reaction to Lupita Nyong’o, a black actress, being cast as Helen of Troy.

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Food I have eaten…

This week I catered a writing retreat that I was fortunate to be able to also attend in part. Based at the Grain Store, a beautiful venue nestled in the south downs and led by author Holly Dawson it was a very inspiring day amongst fellow aspiring writers. We shared the lunch I had prepared with my friend Cate who often cooks with me and who on this occasion made a most excellent hummus and introduced me to the delights of raw, shaved courgettes. The menu was this, pictures beneath each description:

Hummus made with a lot of garlic, lemon and tahini and Bold Bean Queen Chickpeas, the stock included which gave it a lovely body and rich flavour. I made a ring of this around the edge of a serving platter and in the centre I put a simple salad of grated beetroot and carrot dressed with lemon, extra virgin olive oil and fresh coriander leaf. Lots of salt and pepper in both, of course.

Courgettes topped and tailed and then shaved into ribbons with a potato peeler. A simple dressing of lemon juice, extra virgin olive oil, a small pinch of chilli flakes - Cate would have preferred to use pul biber, the Turkish chilli which is mild and sweet, but I had none. The dressing was massaged into the courgette shortly before serving. I added some delicious agretti from Barcombe organic farm, which is similar to samphire and well worth seeking out at the moment.

A salad of brown rice, sliced green olives, french beans, sultanas and lentils dressed with a tarka - oil heated gently and flavoured with garlic, whole cumin and coriander seeds a little turmeric, cinnamon and ground allspice - I added a little cider vinegar to the dressing once the oil had cooled. All topped with some balsamic pickled red onions.

Tomatoes dressed with a carrot top and basil pesto made simply with sunflower seeds and extra virgin olive oil, a little balsamic vinegar added for sweetness and Kalamata olives and capers added for salty juiciness.

These salads were served with some green leaves, a mustard dressing, a yoghurt and dill dressing and some hot from the oven Spanakopita pies, a recipe I shall share another day as I have rendered myself ravenous and must now go and eat.

With love,

Chloe x

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In between catering a lunch for a private tour group at Farleys and doing my work admin I did some family stuff involving my mum who yesterday had an operation. Our son popped home before heading out to his girlfriends, he’s got a man coming to look at his car that he’s selling as he needed to buy a van for work, so we’ve talked a bit about the logistics of all that. I spent a nice while in between prepping the lunch first thing this morning messaging back and forth with our daughter in Australia. At the moment one of Charlie’s young cousins is staying from Australia and it’s been fun just now helping her plan a day trip to London on Friday.

So all the emails have been replied to (I think) and the invoices and deposit requests have gone out (I hope). I’ve been on social media and replied to comments and DMs and caught up with WhatsApp and voicemail, responding to, amongst other things, Workshop and Friday food enquiries. Sample menus have gone to those who requested them and those who have not yet replied have been gently poked. The bank balance has been checked and payments due out over the next week or so reviewed. What does next week hold? One lunch and a retreat day to cater, community shop samosas for Thursday and dammit a wholesale spice order to make up and I forgot to order the spices, again!

This week on Monday I taught a workshop of Lee Millers recipes in her kitchen at Farleys House and Gallery. Yesterday I started on prep for today’s lunch and then went to London to visit mum. It was very hot but the train was blissfully cool. I had a mojito on the train home (thank you M&S) but then couldn’t sleep until inevitably just before being woken by my 5.45 alarm, when all the above began.

Simultaneous with all this, I’ve had angry men up my arse in my car on more than a couple of occasions (despite the fact I drive at the speed limit when safe to do so, as I was taught) while I have also had to coach myself at not being driven bonkers by the drivers that coast along the Lewes Road sometimes at 35 miles an hour, sometimes at 45, oops no, back to 35 miles an hour for that gentle bend in the road. There’s been through the night football and local building work. Our cat is old and, I suspect, a little senile which manifests mainly with him yelling at us whenever he’s in the house. And the heat. Oof, the heat. And the relentless flashes of difficult news - Nelson Xavier Wells, sea temperatures rising, so called ‘cease fires’ ending, genocides continuing, wars maintaining, Suella Braverman making idiotic and dangerous statements, Trump sulking over the football and Iran, Farage throwing up hysterical smoke screens to cover his money grubbing dishonesty. And please can we just abolish the monarchy already? Oh and then there is the peri/menopause symptoms which are currently endless bleeds, which is fun.

Is it only Wednesday?

No, now it is Thursday. I finished this post and then Substack deleted the draft, lesson learnt….

To hope…

Despite the tidal waves of unsolicited guidance thrown regarding all things health and fitness, I have managed to maintain the simple practice of high fibre, low meat and 2 litres of water a day and am pleased to report that it continues to regulate my gut. A selection of photographs and sketched recipe notes below on what I have been eating.

Lee Miller knew about the importance of eating fibre, as we mostly all did back in the middle of the last century, in those days before supermarkets and fast food and the hyper industrialisation of the food market, when our diets were mostly vegetables with occasional meat, fish and dairy on high days and holidays. I stepped into Waitrose earlier today, struck by how blissfully cool it was in one instant and then by how insane it is that all the supermarkets all over the world will be guzzling energy keeping themselves cool and fragrance free, so contributing massively to the problems causing temperatures to rise in the summer months. It’s utterly unsustainable. Please do support local food growers and local food markets whenever you can, they are hope in practice and need our support in all the ways we can manifest it, particularly in the midst of this climate collapse caused heatwave.

When I teach Lee Miller’s recipes at Farleys I am always struck by how healthy they are. Mondays workshop was uniquely attended by four men, all of whom had booked independently, something I haven’t before experienced in all my years teaching cookery workshops. We were lucky to have some shady sunshine to sit in for lunch, as you can see in the picture above, it really is a very beautiful place. The lunch we shared during Mondays workshop easily had over 25 different vegetables, herbs, spices, fruits, nuts and edible herbs in it. Some of the dishes made on Monday were on the menu for the private house tour I catered yesterday, including her coriander rice salad, which I like to make with brown basmati (she lists it as an option) that also has sultanas, flaked almonds, pine nuts, celery, bell peppers, cucumber, tarragon, coriander (leaf and seeds, boiled for 10 minutes and a game changer for me when I first made the recipe some years ago now), sliced Queen green olives with a mustard dressing. It’s very tasty and I deliberately made more than was needed so we could have some for supper last night. We added some tinned tuna and had it with feta and a green salad, picture below. The salad is easy to make, simply chop the vegetables small, toast the almonds and pine nuts and mix together with a vinaigrette made with Dijon mustard, white wine or cider vinegar, a little sugar or honey, salt and pepper and olive oil.

All the food descriptions that follow have corresponding pictures below. The Merchant Gourmand range of pre cooked pulses and grains comes in very handy when it’s too hot to cook and you’ve not got around to bulk cooking up the like yourself. This week I used a sachet of their Persian Rice and Lentils to make a salad, adding rocket, coriander leaf and some sliced roasted bell peppers from a jar. We had this with some blanched spinach and a simply roasted chicken supreme.

A few days later I made a simple lentil stew by cooking some lentils in a broth of water with a tin of chopped tomatoes, allowing the lentils to thicken as they cooked, only adding extra water when it looked like they might stick. I added a bag of spinach to the pot at the end of cooking and crumbled in some feta - we’re eating a fair bit of feta at the moment because it’s synonymous with summer and also because I find sheep and goats cheese much easier to digest than cows milk cheeses. We had this with pasta and home made pesto and a leafy green salad.

French beans are in season and I am so happy to enjoy them again - they are the number one vegetable I miss the most since committing to not buying air freighted vegetables - most of the year they come from Kenya and Senegal. If you don’t already, I urge you to shop mindfully and seasonally making sure to check the country of origin on all fruit and vegetables. It does make a lot off limits for much of the year, but then you get to experience the joy of the season coming back round. I love beans raw or lightly blanched or roasted. If I roast any other veg’ at the moment I have taken to throwing some tender new season french beans in with a couple of cloves of crushed garlic just for the last five minutes of cooking, this is all they need.

The aubergine, courgette and French beans I roasted, pictured above, we had for a couple of suppers and one lunch. The first night we enjoyed them with a bit of pan fried sea bream (excuse the photo, I am hopeless at cooking fish in a pan and making it look pretty) which we had with a salad of tomatoes, basil and mixed leaves, dressed with some of the pesto I had made.

It is now Friday and I have had a day of baking - 4 cakes, 21 samosas and I also pressure cooked a batch of Bolognese, some for my parents who I shall visit tomorrow and some for us to make an easy supper for when I get back from London, hopefully avoiding any world cup nonsense on the way. The following is a recipe in the Substack recipe format - I would very much appreciate feedback on the way that I present food and recipes - do you actively want formatted recipes or do you like the more abstract notated ones as above? Do you like a little of both?

Thank you for reading, I am going to take my melty brain offline now! Have a great weekend and stay cool and hopeful, wherever you are.

Much love, Chloe x

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Our daughter’s bedroom is at the front of the house on the first floor, next door to our room and upstairs from the living room. When they’re home, as they have been for the last three weeks, the door is always shut, whether they are in or out. Now the door remains open, marking their absence and return to the temporary home they’ve made for themselves in Australia. Back in 2024, after their first departure, it took a long time to get used to the newness of the open door. It alters the ambience of the house, which is south facing, so when the door to the front bedroom is open the hallway fills with light and noises from the street below. When our child is in residence upstairs is always dark, a glow of low lighting emanates permanently from under the door and this light is often matched with a low rumble of voices, the chatter of friendships, the energy of preparing to go out or settling down to staying in.

It has been a shock to realise how much I have retreated into myself in the quietness of the house of men that I found myself in after Noa’s initial departure two years ago. Their return and vital energy instantly changing the dynamic of our home, filling all the corners with interest and enquiry, lifting dust from the corners of all the rooms, buying flowers and baking cakes, inviting friends over, using all the spaces. To say I miss them is an absurd understatement.

Our daughter flying back to Australia coincided with the week of heat which itself coincided with climate action week, with numerous climate action events being cancelled because of the climate collapse caused heatwave. Oh the irony. Yesterday while shopping, the fishmonger wondered out loud about how it was that we coped in 1976 but now we can’t and I was too tired and fragile feeling to go into the intense difference between then and now and why this new heat is a problem. This ‘we’ve all gone soft’ narrative is part of the far right play book, a necessary angle to dismiss fears of climate change and so refute the need for changes in policy and lifestyle, a further conviction that colonial patriarchal capitalism is the only way. It is, of course, bollocks.

Last week I learnt in Carole Cadwaller’s excellent newsletter How to Survive the Broligarchy, that CEOs of big tech now attend G7 and the like, sitting alongside presidents and prime ministers, such is the power and influence they wield, and this knowledge along with the newly learnt projection that when I am in my dotage we will have both limited water and average summer temperatures of 45 degrees combines in both heart and mind to quite paralysing effect. Limited water due to data centres, increased temperatures due to data centres and all the other punishing draws on our beautiful planet and her many natural resources. All this techno bull crap shoved at us by greedy tech bro billionaires, now trillionaires, somebody make it stop. The widening of the divide ever growing. The cheapness of life, of human kind, ever more consistently reinforced within the hierarchy of ‘progress’ and ‘advances’ and what does it matter if people die in the process of AI discovering how to stop people from dying? What do the masses matter? The writhing lower orders, let them drink coke.

I love the messiness of humanity, the many rolling forms it takes. They can keep the sharp collar bones and crisp clean lines of the aesthetics of the super rich, all that beige and cream and no mess or noise. Tightly clipped lawns and tinted windows on cars, skin pulled taught over cheek bones and the rigour mortis smiles around blinding white teeth of the dead inside.

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It’s a market week for me this week and I love the dive into human community that this will be. I love the early morning sleepy energy of my fellow stall holders as we set up our tables in the relative cool, put out our wares - the cheeses and teas, bread, cakes, fruit, flowers, spices. Fresh produce picked in the early hours of the same morning will be a true delight now it is early July - there will be tomatoes and basil, broad beans, runner beans, courgettes and their flowers, strawberries, cherries and red currents. We will chat and share stories of the recent heat. We will commiserate over any losses and wonder over the future. I am interested to hear from Toos, farmer at Laines Organic who has worked so hard on building her soil that she ordinarily doesn’t have to water her crops, I would like to know if this has maintained during the heatwave. I will ask Arthur of Greenaway Fruit Farm how long cherry season will last this year, should we be making jam while the sun shines with all his summer berries, will the time we have them this year be shorter than usual?

And then the punters will arrive and the conversations will flow. As someone who works predominantly on their own I love this aspect of market trading, the chatter and banter, the camaraderie. It quite fills me up while also emptying me out of the many thoughts and feelings I have had rattling around in my own head for the few weeks between outings. And then I get to shop - trader discounts being yet another excellent perk of market trading.

This week I am craving the intense flavours of summer, the tomatoes and basil, garlic and olive oil, rich pungent and ripe soft cheeses, deliciously crusted loaves. Who needs to cook with ingredients like this? On Saturday I will be at Florence Road Market in Brighton where I shall buy some cheese from Lucie who has some delightful sheep and goats cheese (I find cows milk very hard to digest and am also increasingly disturbed by the dairy industry, more on that another time). I will buy eggs and vegetables from Rock Farm, adding to what I will have bought from Laines the day before at Lewes Friday Food Market.

There are many adaptations we can/should/must make to our lifestyles in the hope we can influence the rising global temperatures. A relatively easy and highly pleasurable one is to shop local - buy fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy if you eat them, from the farmers that grow them. Ask the farmer butcher if their beef is grass or grain fed, where do their pigs live, are their chickens indoor or outdoor reared. Learn from organic vegetable growers what is in season, what is at its best to eat right now. If you must shop in supermarkets (I am often in supermarkets) check the country of origin of the vegetables you are buying. Aside from the flavour and health benefits of buying organic, the fact that the produce has no preserving chemicals inside or out, and so it will by necessity not have travelled far from where it has grown is another bonus. No one needs french beans badly enough to justify buying ones that were grown in Peru. Or mange tout from Kenya. Head out to market this weekend if you are lucky enough to have one near you. Come and say ‘hi’ if you are local to Lewes or Brighton. My friend and B Corp consultant, amongst much else, Mica Janiv wrote excellently on this and more in her monthly posting on the Lewes Climate Hub website, I was flattered to be mentioned in Mica’s list of local producers she likes to buy from read it here.

In amongst the heat and high anxiety this week I learnt that birds only sing freely and happily when they feel safe and that in turn listening to bird song helps soothe our human nervous systems. What a lovely fact this is. Yesterday I took Pepper for a woodland walk and we both gained a lot of soothing enjoyment from being in the cool of the trees, touching their bark and listening to the birds sing.

As part of a lunch party menu at the weekend I made a happy discovery. I was roasting some chicken with garlic - whole bulbs cut in half across their middles - and thick slices of lemon. This was to be served cold with a salsa verde. My food processor was ready to go to make the salsa with about 10 green olives (quantities have been changed to make enough for 4-6 rather than 30!), a tablespoon of drained capers, a small bunch of parsley - leaves and stalks - and the same of coriander, along with the leaves of a generous bunch of basil, a good quantity of extra virgin olive oil (probably around 75ml) and some salt and pepper. I was about to add some raw garlic and lemon zest and juice when I noticed the sweet and sticky lemon and garlic from the roasting tray, and so I chucked some of this in instead - sublime! You don’t need to be roasting chicken to do this, roast some summer vegetables with lemon slices and garlic and make a salsa verde as described to dress them with. There is so much joy in using all of a lemon - pith, zest, juice - such great flavour in the essential oils found in the peel. Just whizz the lot up to a coarse paste and store in the fridge if you don’t eat it all in one go.

A brief gut update for those with similar concerns - increasing fibre, lowering meat (once or twice a week at most) and committing to drinking 2 litres of water a day has had an excellent impact on my IBS. I read recently, I cannot remember where, that research has shown that people who focus on one goal diet wise are more likely to succeed - Lordy but does that feel obvious as I type it out - but I am happy to say that rather than worrying over counting/limiting/variously controlling lots of different things, simply piling my plates high with lots of vegetables, pulses and whole grains at every meal has settled my digestion and regulated my bowel. It is also a delicious and satisfying way to eat. Next week I shall share some of these plates, I have been photographing and recording as I go, lots of preparing ahead and eating for lunch the next day, basically supporting myself by making sure that I have what I need and cannot reach for the toaster because there is nothing else to eat.

Amongst the delight of birdsong, other hopeful distractions came my way this week. I was recommended this excellent podcast by Miller Libertine Bitter/Sweet that explores the connections between food and memory.

After the sad passing of actor Anthony Head ITV made all episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer available to watch on ITVX, I am happily making my way into series 2, delighting at the awful clothes and dated music, if like me you favour gentle nonsense on the telly box then I absolutely recommend that you do the same.

My kitchen garden is a total joy - see pic for reference. I bought a sunflower at a plant sale that is currently growing about half a foot a day. I just soiled up my potatoes and fed my tomatoes, cucumbers and dahlias and the David Austin climbing rose ‘Warm Welcome’ that I bought to go against the black wood of the barn is everything I hoped it would be.

Thank you for reading if you made it this far and for subscribing if this landed in your inbox and for being a paid subscriber if that is you. Every week I get notifications from stripe that payments are heading to my bank account and it means everything to have your support for my business and my writing. I am working on making a printed version of the 6 part spice guide I have shared on here, use the index to find it if you haven’t already. As ever this new booklet will go out free to paid subscribers, I am aiming for early Autumn, which considering it is August in a couple of weeks will be here before you know it!

With love,

Chloe x

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It is 3pm and 29 degrees. After a busy weekend working, today (Monday) is a rest and admin day (so essentially a work day) but I am struggling to do much more than sleep. As ever.

The youngest needed taking to Haywards Heath this morning, they fly back to Australia on Thursday after a three week visit. It’s been lovely to have a full nest. Apologies for the knock on with posting efficiency on here.

Luckily work does not need me in the kitchen until Wednesday. Unluckily that is the hottest day forecast this week and we have a conference of 215 delegates to prep’ for, so we shall start at 7.30am with the blinds down, doors shut and air conditioning on, hoping for the best.

Wherever you are and whatever you need to be doing I hope that you are managing it. Stay safe and hydrated.

Food is often the last thing on my mind in heat like this, beyond strawberry mivvies and light grazing snacks. I have a mildly upset tummy today, which I am putting down to stress, and so haven’t managed much more than a couple of Dr Kaargs protein thin crackers. I may slice myself up an apple in a minute, to have with some peanut butter. Maybe a slice of cool goats cheese from the log in the fridge and a radish or 2. Grazing plates I used to call them when Noa was on steroids and I was keeping a keen eye on supporting them retaining a healthy weight. The 5 day block of the steroid dexamethasone was the most miserable aspect of their drug regime over the whole 2 and a half years of cancer treatment, with perhaps the exception of some of the intense chemotherapies given in the first 6 months. There was a look often exchanged between all us hospital parents ‘Dex week’ ’yup’ and we all knew. I used to sing a song in my head to part of the tune of Music Man - if you know it, the bit in the song that goes ‘pia pia piano, piano, piano’ I would sing ‘dexa dexa methasone, methasone, methasone’ to….a small window into the craziness of that time.

Dexamethasone impacted all the children differently but with equal intensity. It would cause Noa to stay home from school more than chemo ever did. It would completely flatten their mood - not fun for a 7,8,9 year old to experience the heavy moods and depression caused by steroids. The other main symptom was an intense appetite.

It’s common for people on steroids to crave the food they had when first given the drug. When this happened for Noa they were still in London at St George’s, discharged from the intensive care unit, fully diagnosed with Non Hodgkins Lymphoma and waiting for a bed to come free at the Marsden. At St George’s they still cooked on site and Noa loved the food. Particularly the slightly over boiled French beans, rice and gravy, subsequent cravings were often as much about texture as they were the intense savouriness of the food. I learnt at the time that steroids would bypass the more juvenile sweet craving tastebuds and head straight for the primeval ‘give me meat’ savoury ones. Memories of Noa’s eyes glistening while she talked with a hospital made friend during a happily coinciding outpatients appointment about pork chops while we mums discussed managing their food needs. This mum got up at 5am every day of their child’s steroid blocks to roast a chicken, this is what she would feed on over the course of the day.

And so most steroid blocks would carry many requests from Noa for savoury feasting, most often requiring as an accompaniment over cooked beans, rice and thin Bisto chicken gravy. Noodles and soya sauce was another firm favourite.  Always savoury, salty, umami cravings. I worried a little over the lack of fibre and diversity and so the snack or grazing plate was born.

At its centre would lie some sort of creamy dip - maybe some cream cheese or hummus, tzatziki or taramasalata. And surrounding it would be various things to dip and smear - radish, pickled onions, gherkins, cucumber and carrot spears, cherry tomatoes, bits of cooked chicken, cold left over potatoes, mange toute, slices of bell pepper, baby gem lettuce leaves, olives, cream crackers, pitta bread. Often there would be fruit too - sliced apple, mango, pear, nectarine, endless grapes and kiwi fruit eaten like boiled eggs in their shells.

This is how I want to eat now, with an ever present platter of tasty and healthy things to pick at through the day. Nothing that screams ‘you must eat me now or I shall spoil’, nothing that needs heat to generate it, nothing that will create a large pile of washing up in its preparation.

If I were to make it to the shops (unlikely, but perhaps a walk will do me good) I would buy fennel for cutting into batons, its cooling aniseed is speaking loud to my griping stomach. I’d like some bitter chicory too, and some of the firm little cucumbers that were always so readily available at this time of year when we lived in Hackney, but are much harder to come by down in East Sussex. I think I would make a guacamole dip, creamy with a little Greek yoghurt and fresh with coriander leaf and lime and salt or maybe a sprinkling of tagin, that delightful Mexican salt that is tangy with dried lime and chillies.

I would get some pickled beetroot and jarred roasted vegetables, probably some soft dark pitted Kalamata olives and maybe a tin of dolmades if I’m feeling fancy. Sugar snaps and mange toute if I can find some English grown in Seasons, our local health food shop, there may be padron peppers but they need heat so perhaps not..

For new subscribers and a reminder for those who have been here longer, you can download my free recipe booklet Making Summer Simple on this post. The pinned post on Hope’s Kitchen is an index of recipes shared so far if you are looking for something specific. And don’t forget that you can search the entire archive via the search bar, just type in an ingredient and if I’ve written about it, the posts will come up.

On Sunday I listed new cookery workshop dates for autumn, find them here.

I also restocked the spice larder so if you are in need of any of my Seven Sisters’ Spices small batch produced organic hand blended spices, salts, dukkahs or chutneys head over here. I post throughout the UK.

Saturday saw me hosting my annual midsummer long table event, such a lovely evening. I have listed a new date for September to take place in the new space adjacent to my kitchen. You can book a seat at the table here.

Paid subscribers - your long table and workshop discount codes still apply - if you can’t lay your hands on them send me an email or DM and I’ll ping it over. 10% off workshop places and pop up events - well worth the £5 a month of £50 annual paid subscription fee.

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Last bit of news - I will be teaching in Lee Millers kitchen at Farleys on Monday July 6th and there are still 4 places remaining. I’m afraid I cannot extend subscriber discounts to these events. But they are glorious days. See here if you would like to book to come along.

As ever, hope lies in community, I am very happy to have reached 500 subscribers to this newsletter, thanks so much for coming along. Please post a comment if there is anything that you would like me to write about food and spice wise, I am often stuck for inspiration and any pointers are most welcome!

Happy cooking.

Much love, Chloe x

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On Friday night Jhané Gibson won Masterchef and I know for a fact that I wasn’t the only one to cry through most of the episode. If you didn’t watch the series I think the final would work as a stand alone, particularly if you need a reason to feel hopeful about life, want to celebrate women generally (hurrah for the new judges) and watch a young black woman win a major prize and speak openly about what it means for someone who ‘looks like me’ to win. It came at the end of a week when Farage deliberately and successfully baited ignorant racists into violent action by claiming institutional racism against white people. In a big way Jhane and her incredible talent and emotional honesty put my world back on its axis.

The heart surge I gained watching her win was beautifully enhanced by the extra joy of watching Grace Dent and Anna Haugh, the new female judges, teary eyed and emitting so much love for all 3 finalists. Alongside being moved by Jhané’s delicious love filled food, they clearly understood the significance of what was taking place. This was first evident, to my mind, in an earlier episode, when they took the remaining contestants to Antigua and Barbuda in the Caribbean for the first heat of finals week - another episode that would work as a stand alone if you want a dopamine hit. Jhané has Jamaican ancestry, watching her talent soar while working in kitchens full of black people, led by black chefs and feeding her food to black audiences was a wonderful experience, I only wish that Grace and Anna had verbalised a little of what was going on in front of the cameras. They have been very ready as judges to openly comment on when people are doing particularly well and why this might be. I despise the likes of Farage for creating a climate where this sort of positive commentary is increasingly shied away from.

I’ve watched Masterchef in all its iterations on and off for years and most often the home cooks of a particular demographic do better, those who have a level of confidence and ambition which is regularly positively impacted by being white in a white country that doles out racism towards black people and people of colour socially, economically and institutionally both today and historically. There is nothing wrong in naming this. There is nothing wrong in pointing out how huge it might be for Jhane to find herself in the final of Masterchef in the Caribbean, cooking food and ingredients she’s grown up around amongst people who look like her. I imagine there are those who would like to claim unfair advantage, wilfully overlooking all the occasions in the competition and indeed life when the many white male winners thrived in white male run kitchens (please note this is not to erase or discount previous winners who do not fit that demographic, I know that there have been many, it was the timing and the beautiful explicitness of this instance that shone out for me).

Thankfully the BBC allowed Jhane her own voice to speak to the experience, ending the Antigua and Barbuda episode with her telling the collected diners, chefs, judges and other contestants:

“Do you know what, I’m crying because I just feel so happy and so proud to have done this. I, (cries a little) genuinely I think of my grandparents coming to the UK on a boat all those years ago and I’m here, in Antigua. It’s just crazy, I’ve got so much emotion but I’m just happy that you loved the food”

The reflected love was beautiful to watch. I’ve gone back to it a couple of times, to shed another tear or two of pure joy.

I shall leave you hear with Jhané’s final words to the judges after they had praised her final cook up. It’s traditional for contestants to say a little of what the experience has meant to them, here’s what Jhané said:

“I think sometimes people who look like me or sound like me or who come from my background, don’t feel that places like this are for them and I just feel so proud that I got to represent, you know, my little cousins, my little sisters and show people that actually, you can put anything you put your mind to.”

With love & hope,

Chloe x - PS I hope you enjoy the recipe below. Apologies for the lack of vegan variation - here is a link to a vegan version of the gluten free pie crust, I would love to hear of any vegan fillings you put in it.

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Talking of home, I managed our week night suppers well by making a ratatouille like dish on the first night, starting with a red onion which I softened and rendered golden in olive oil with a little crushed garlic, to this I added sliced aubergine and more oil (such a sponge for oil is aubergine!) which I fried until coloured and soft, then two chopped up courgettes went in to sweat for just a minute before adding a tin of chopped tomatoes - I do not enjoy over cooked watery courgettes in dishes with other vegetables. I love a Greek style courgette ‘mush’ of very well done slices, cooked long in lots of oil with garlic and lemon and seasoned well with salt and pepper. But in things like ratatouille I prefer them to hold themselves together a little more. At the same time as the tomatoes I added a jar of Bold Bean queen chickpeas - these are such a creamy delight, miles better than any chickpea gained from a tin and well worth the extra money if you have it to spend. This cooked together for about 15 minutes before I finished the dish just before serving with some cashew, basil, parsley and coriander pesto I had made for a job the week before, although it would have been fine without.

We enjoyed this served hot on the first night with a salad of sliced mange toute, leaves and some olives and sliced red peppers from jars. We also had some wedges of feta, that melted a little into the ratatouille in a very pleasing manner (pictured). Night two the ratatouille was served cold with some hot prawns fried in a little butter and garlic, alongside a salad of leaves, asparagus, cucumber and chicory for which I made a dressing with the remains of the feta from the night before mashed together with a dollop of Greek yoghurt, some olive oil, cider vinegar and lots of chopped parsley and coriander (also pictured). What was left of the ratatouille served as a base for my packed lunches for the next two days, once with boiled eggs, next with tuna.

A reminder that my Making Summer Simple booklet of 17 recipes for salads is available as a free download on last weeks news, find it here. This went out to paid subscribers as an A5 booklet, become a paid subscriber and I shall send you one in the post.

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At the moment I am crying a lot. I cry in the car, at work, in the shower, in shops. My tears are most often spontaneous and unexpected. They explode out, sometimes violently, they tend to be short lived - not dissimilar in fact, to the daily episode of projectile vomiting I experienced through both of my pregnancies. There is also a similar feeling of newness in my hormonal condition (as I continue to straddle the magical horse ride that is the journey from peri into full menopause), a familiarity with the overwhelm I experienced at the beginning of pregnancy - a new moment, a new chapter, a new ride of intensity.

All of these feelings are further complicated by the imminent return of our daughter who has spent the last two years and 6 weeks living in Australia – they are coming home on Thursday for a 3 week long visit. We have not seen them in 2 years. TWO YEARS! Their leaving triggered a lot of PTSD related stuff for me connected with things I have yet to fully process regarding their cancer treatment, I wrote about it here. While I am thrilled at their fast approaching return, I am scared stupid at the prospect of them then leaving once more and of perhaps finding myself falling a little to pieces all over again. But as ever thoughts of food and feeding are scooping me up. I am about to make a big vat of Bolognese, their last meal before flying out and a long time favourite. I shall portion it out and freeze it, giving me some evenings when I can simply spend time with them rather than cook, although I am greatly looking forward to cooking while they potter about in their room, perhaps with a friend or two. We’ve so missed the noisy chaos that is first signalled by a big tangle of shoes in the hall when we get in, a sign that Noa is home with some of their gang.

423 people opened and perhaps read my last newsletter, the one with the free recipe PDF. Despite this excellent open rate it gained 3 likes and no comments or re-shares. I try very hard not to focus on numbers, but now that they have so many ways to measure performance on here and with the aforementioned volatility of hormones, I find it very hard not to feel a little gutted by the lack of engagement. Nonetheless, here I am again, talking into the void. Likes, shares and comments most welcome, thank you.

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Thought of the week….. Where is the wisdom in commodifying intelligence? We no longer need to develop and hone our thinking, processing, decision making, planning, or strategising skills because apparently we can pay AI to do all this for us. But how will future humans form an appropriate question to gain the knowledge they require? Will we not just reach a stage where humans can no longer form coherent sentences and the AI that learnt from an older generation who mostly could, won’t be able to understand what a future illiterate human is asking? Also, what about dementia? Current medical research tells us that in order to hold back the inevitable decay of our brain cells we must use them. Will the massively growing ageing population get another boost in say 15 years by millions of frequent AI users becoming incapable of living independently because their brains have been rendered useless through non use? Answers in the comments please….

In this era of AI (imagine a country, like Japan, where government restricts its use. Imagine a government, like nowhere I have heard of, actively researching environmentally gentle ways to generate the energy it needs) I am very grateful that my son is a brick layer. He loves his work and has plenty of it and is not in any imminent danger of being taken over by a robot (yet). It’s hard manual labour. Standard day rate, excluding materials, is anywhere upwards of £2-3-400 a day and more. I don’t know exactly what my son earns as a basic day rate, it’s not my information to share regardless. But I do know that he earns more than me.

Cooking is hard manual labour. I don’t charge a day rate, I charge by the job. And this increasingly seems absurd to me. I have implemented a minimum price I will work for, because catering say a lunch for 6 at £20 a head is just not economically viable if that is the only job of the day. But I think I need to put this further into action because times are getting leaner and this is not a joke. It’s hard to work out the maths in a way that wouldn’t make me prohibitively expensive for many - again thoughts in the comments most welcome. I have never used a caterer myself, and so in truth my understanding of how the industry works is fairly limited (she says on a public platform, 12 years in) beyond the standard practice of charging per head. Have you been asked for a minimum flat fee from a caterer? Before the cost of the job has been discussed?

A possible hopeful aspect of AI and the gobbling up of paid work that it is doing is that it might, perhaps, usher in a universal basic income…and this nonsense where cleaners earn a fraction of the income that say a celebrity generates can be levelled. Ha ha. But I live in hope.

In the meantime I believe very much in supporting independent businesses as much as possible and this extends to paid subscriptions. I support 4 individuals and 2 small political groups with subs of no more than £6 each a month. For this I gain various things in return, but mostly I do it because I think that what the individuals are doing has value and I enjoy it and I want them to be able to continue and indeed to do more. If I could build my own paid subscriber number from 40 to 100 it would make a massive difference to the day to day pressures that my business faces. Most of the time I think ‘don’t be ridiculous, if you can’t generate the income you need then you must go and find alternative work’ but I do generate the income I need, frankly a flipping amazing achievement considering the rent we pay to keep a roof over our heads, what I would dearly love is to not have to worry, all the bloody time, about my ability to do so. “Cancel those subscriptions you have” I hear some say, but then that would be hypocritical, I am a big believer in putting my money where my mouth is. Substack has gained a growing reputation for being a place where people can come on, publish some writing and generate income, this has caused it to be flooded of late with new users. This makes it a less chat happy gentle space to inhabit, it’s also caused algorithmic number chasing changes as mentioned above, that frankly do in my brain. I wonder what the statistics are for AI generated paid newsletters on here? I am sure that they are higher in number than any of us might like to think.

Please consider becoming a paid subscriber, thanks always to those who are, plus you get my Fanzine and self published recipe booklets through the post and occasional discounts on workshops, events and products. It’s a proper bargain at £5 a month or £50 for the year.

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While I am on supporting things we love, my hugely talented friend Laura Mugridge, actor, workshop leader, writer (Laura wrote the things that make me happy piece in Issue 2 of Hope’s Kitchen the Fanzine) and creator of the gorgeous and funny Inside the Lines podcast along with her friend Paul - an audio sitcom about a pair of friends who run a colouring in shop in Brighton. I have shared it on here before because it is a delight in soothing comedy. They are currently running an extremely modest Crowdfunder to enable them to make a second series, please support them here if you can. Have a listen to series one here if you need to be inspired to pledge some cash. Glasses of milk and party rings for all!

Thanks always for reading, this does feel particularly indulgent but as mentioned last week my need to people please is falling away as I shed my young woman hormones and enter the era of the crone.

With love,

Chloe x

Yesterday morning I set out early and walked our hot black dog along the old railway track. I had lived here for over ten years before I discovered this haven for dog walkers and teenaged drinkers (judging by the occasional visual evidence of detritus) although I had walked past the hidden entrance to the track countless times. It is strange to think of a train running along and over the river, across Malling rec’ and off up country to Uckfield. All that’s left now are high embankments and a narrow road bridge over the top. It’s the high, tree clad embankments that offer the shade, so necessary for the walking of black dogs during this heat wave.

This is no time for generating heat in the kitchen, and so I am sharing here for those of you who do not have a copy - apologies for the repetition to those who do - my recipe booklet Making Summer Simple, which is all about using spices to prepare dressings, pastes, salts & sprinkles that can be called on again and again when creating salads, so minimising the time spent in the kitchen. There is also a lengthy introduction, from which you will find an excerpt below to entice you into the book as a whole.

Subscribers who were paying at the time of printing will have received a paper copy of this booklet - if you are a paid subscriber who arrived after this event, please send me an email or direct message and I shall post one out to you sevensistersspices@yahoo.co.uk. If you are not a paid subscriber and would like a hard copy, you can purchase one here for £6, or better yet - for me and for you economically - become a paid subscriber and I shall send you one, and a copy of my Spice Blend Recipe booklet too. Paid subscribers receive my Fanzine Hope’s Kitchen as well as any recipe booklets I produce, alongside discounts on products, workshops and events. I appreciate my paid subscribers very much as they allow me, through the income generated, to produce my Fanzine, a hope and love project. Issue 3 is in the works, the interview edition, and I am very much looking forward to the conversations that I will be having and recording in the process of putting it all together. I do not paywall content on this platform as I believe free access is important, but it must be said that I would not find or make the time to write without the income and psychological support that the income from my paid subscribers provides, if you enjoy Hope’s Kitchen and would like to gift me more time to write, becoming a paid subscriber for £5 a month or £50 for a year is a wonderful way to do this.

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With love,

Chloe x

Making Summer Simple 3

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This week we’ve eaten tomatoes and prawns, potatoes and bell peppers. We’ve had rice and coconut - in milk form and desiccated. I’ve eaten a lot of almonds and cashews, pecans and pistachios. Mango and aubergine, avocado and lemons. Filthy foreign muck, all of it.

Think for a minute about all the good things that wouldn’t have happened if no human had ever got on a horse or in a boat and decided to take a look to see what it is that’s to be found ‘over there’ (and yes, I know I am glossing over the atrocities that this movement has frequently caused, but we’ve dwelt on that in the past and the spirit of this piece - the point - is, of course, hopefulness.)

Tomatoes would not have made it to Italy.

We would have no potatoes in the UK.

You’d be drinking nettle tea for breakfast, no sugar for sweetening, no coffee for you.

No chocolate on your biscuit.

So much of all that we love has evolved from the cross cultivation of many different people and places. How can you march to stop this eternal mingling of human spirits? How can you build a movement based on wanting this ancient practice of humanity to end?

I think that this is where much of my fear of racists and racism is rooted. As a child the racist abuse I got was from people who thought I was from Pakistan (they didn’t care where I was from of course, they just liked flinging the slur ‘paki’ at brown people) and it confused me such a lot because I wasn’t from Pakistan, so why were they shouting at me? The fundamental idiocy of it, the unstable sanity and anti humanity that lies at its core. How do you rationalise with that? And I am not talking here of the leaders of these movements, these are clever men (predominantly) who are master manipulators and use racism as a tool to mob mobilise. I’m talking about my fear of engaging with your average ‘man on the street’ racist. What I mean to say is good grief, when there is so much to celebrate and so much to love and life is so hard and yet poppies still grow through the cracks in the pavement, why do people choose to engage in hate? A rhetorical question. And I’m afraid my commitment to weekly posting is inevitably going to lead to the occasional incoherent ramble. So here we are. And as I said, I have a stinking head cold…

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In other news…. I think that most people can relate to this retelling of a moment, the moment midway through a clear out when all you’ve done is make an almighty mess of stuff that was already a mess but it was kind of an ordered mess. The challenge with this sort of ordered mess is that the only process that’s going to work at properly tidying it up begins with the complete undoing of all that chaotic order, so making even more chaos. And then begins the really hard work of chucking away and reassembling, the putting things back together again. For me right now the process of crossing over from peri (spellcheck wants to correct this to Peru) into full menopause feels pretty much like that moment. I feel like I’m midway through pulling all the bits of my life down off the shelves and out of the drawers and cupboards, it’s all scattered about all over the floor and I’m sitting in the middle of it overwhelmed, befuddled, exhausted and frequently searching for the thread of thought that will lead me back to understanding why on earth am I doing all this again?

Having any kind of clear out can start off feeling like a hugely positive and welcome event and then end up oppressive and entrapping, cornered in your own kitchen by all your own shit. I really do feel like that in life at the moment. There’s just so much of it all and none of it feels like it really fits and I don’t know which bits I want to keep, which bits are really precious and which are just emotionally caught up in some entanglement of my history and my complicated emotional relationships to ‘stuff’.

And as is fairly constant these days, the pressures of the world at large continue to bear heavy on all aspects of day to day existence. I have been cheered by watching videos of Caribbean dancing and learning how traditional dances on different islands are connected to each other through their roots in Africa. I believe they also share an energy of defiant rebellion, having grown from memory and the trauma of enslavement too. I didn’t manage to engage in the steps via dance that I set out as an ambition last week, I’ve not felt well enough. But the urge to do so remains, so….

The other urge is the same strong pull to make the world go away, to fully embrace my inner crone and bugger off to live in a forest somewhere. It was about a year ago that I first began to think about the crone archetype as depicted mainly in fairy tales and reflect that I had never before seen it as anything aspirational, quite the opposite. Oh what a difference a few decades and a massive hormonal shift make! And so I shall leave you with this little extract of a short story, a work in progress, that I began writing last year, when I first began to dream of self imposed, forest cottage dwelling isolation.

With love,

Chloe x

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Short Story, Work in Progress

In some respects it was the house that claimed her rather than the other way round. It was so dark and forbidding, dim small windows with moss on the frames encroaching the glass. Dank, dark thatch that hung ominously low and heavy, the wire mesh holding it in place visible in parts, looking for all the world like little prosthetic supports. The garden too would have left most defeated before they’d even begun, with its ivy clad walls and dense brambles clawing at old roses, bindweed ensnaring it all in a tight embrace.

“Of course it isn’t within walking distance of any conveniences, and there’s no wi fi, but I’m sure that could be sorted and then, well, online shopping!”

She looked at the estate agent, made a run at an attempt to smile but could see from his expression that she hadn’t managed it. So she looked away and reached up to the thatch, pulling at a straw and finding it surprisingly secure.

“How long has it been empty?”

“6 years since the owner passed away, or thereabouts”

She longed to be on her own, could barely stand the thought that he and his inanities would follow her around as she made her first ever tour of the house she already knew would become her home.

She nodded towards the door and he took the key from his pocket.

“Er, if you don’t mind I will stay out here. You can ask me any questions you might have once you’ve had a look around”

He thrust the key at her, awkwardly glancing over his shoulder towards his shiny white car, clearly wishing he was behind the wheel and on his way to gone already.

She took the proffered key, put it in the lock and made her way inside.

As she pushed the door open against an unseen resistance, the house gave a sigh and somewhere, upstairs perhaps, a door slammed shut. The interior was gloomy at first, almost too dark to make out the space. She closed the door behind her and gave her eyes a moment to adjust. 

Dust sparkled in the only beam of light that made it into the large room, and it fell endlessly onto an uneven floor of terracotta tiles. There was a slight sour smell, rancid butter perhaps, or old bacon fat, that mingled with the stale air of a room uninhabited for many years. There were curled, dried leaves in the far corner, some of which had stirred slightly when the air was disturbed by her entrance.

She stood for a long minute with her back to the front door, scanning the room from its east end, dark and sullen with mute cupboard doors set into two alcoves that stood either side of a chimney breast that itself stood proudly behind a large stove with, she counted, 1, 2, 3 hot plates and 1, 2, 3 oven doors. Excellent she thought, a small smile starting as her heart began to beat a little faster.

The kitchen occupied the whole of the ground floor, aside from a small nook through an open door frame, which led to the staircase and an even smaller toilet that sat under the stairs themselves. Scanning across to the west end of the kitchen and she saw on the wall opposite the stove was a vast hearth with fireplace, in front of which, hanging from the ceiling was a pully dryer that had some bunches of what looked like herbs hanging from it, yes that was sage, and was that lavender? And that looks like a pair of old woollen tights. As she walked through the dust filled light beam towards the fireplace, she noticed a small door behind the hearth, reaching out she realised it was not a hinged door but a piece of wood that slid in place, covering a large void, big enough to hold a small child, a bread oven! And her smile became a beam.

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It’s only now, while dinner is cooking and a glass of wine is not far off, that I have dared to look at the local election results for East Sussex. I am going to focus on the fact that the Green Party have gained 259 seats. And I’m going to leave it at that.

Today began for me in a bit of a rage. I appear to have reached the point in the menopause journey that I’ve heard tell of and indeed read about where I want to mostly set fire to things and tell people to fuck off. Having been a people pleaser for not far off all of my 53 years, this new feeling is quite startling and not a little enjoyable. Most of all it’s an enormous relief. Completely gone is the pull of ‘oh but I really should’ and ‘well if I do that then they might think’ and in their stead is ‘absolutely not, no, and I don’t care if you don’t like it’. Imagine living one’s whole life with that attitude? Imagine!

This point in menopause is mingling and mixing with the very low ebb that is, for me, peak fibromyalgia flare. I am riddled with symptoms that are doing their own bit at influencing my mood towards rage. How did I get here? In the usual way dear reader, let me tell you.

Christmas work nonsense first butted into my most excellent exercise regime of lifting weights 2-3 times a week and walking or dancing 10,000 steps a day, by simply denying me the time to be able to do any of it. Then it exhausted me physically and stressed me emotionally before finally spitting me out in time to do my tax return and so have the joy of seeing on paper how expensive it is for me to work for a living. I’ve been heavy flaring since, the magic three areas of focus for good fibro’ support being well and truly scuppered - exercise, stress management, diet. It always goes in this order, exercise being an excellent way of keeping stress at bay - not exercising causing weight gain and an increase in pain symptoms - resulting anxiety over weight gain and pain causing me to reach for the bread, butter and wine. And here we are. But along with this mornings rage came a renewed vigour to get off my arse and turn the situation around, which I have done before and so can do again. I plan to start with steps and work up from there. Wish me luck. It is all much like the energy we need to get out of the current political hell hole we all find ourselves in - vigilance, dedication, hope….

Part of my steady build up of fury over recent days and weeks has been driven by my frustrations with all forms of social media and their relative ineffectiveness now that Instagram has buggered up all the algorithms and delights in making all us monkeys dance relentlessly for attention to the tune of their organ grinding. This is another thing that I am simply not prepared to do anymore. I started my day (perhaps ironically in the circumstances) by making a carousel post on the aforementioned app, explaining to all those reading that I am setting up a one way, broadcast WhatsApp group with which to share work updates. About two a month, direct into your WhatsApp with no need to doom-scroll or enter your email inbox (which, if anything like mine, is a massive stress trigger on its own) in order to find your way to my current offerings. In 12 hours it’s become a group of 30 people, all clearly engaged and interested in what Seven Sisters’ Spices is up to, and this has given me a generous dose of hope. The aforementioned Instagram post has (again with the irony) gained over 140 likes, unknown for me in many months. Good Lord but this shit is exhausting. You can join my WhatsApp group here if you like, or send me a message with your number and I shall add you.

Earlier this week I made a mid week puff pastry tart dinner, as my friend Katy commented “Mmmmm. The delicious ‘put something on puff pastry’ tea!” It really is a winner. You can see the basic premise here in an earlier tart recipe. This weeks asparagus joy was made epic by the use of some spanakopita filling left over from work, which I smeared over the puff pastry before laying the raw asparagus on top, covering with some grated gran padano cheese and a good drizzle of olive oil and baking in a hot 180c fan oven for about 20 minutes. We cook stuff in the kitchen by eye a lot and in larger quantities than you would ever need to put on one sheet of pre rolled puff pastry, but here is a rough approximation of how to make the right amount of spanakopita filling to make this one tart twice, simply halve it if making one tart or save the rest to add a beaten egg to and wrap in filo pastry for ‘proper’ spanakopita. Why such confusion over quantities? Well one tarts worth uses half a block of feta and half a tub of ricotta, and my new no nonsense, I don’t take any shit from anyone self simply can’t be doing with writing a recipe that calls for half a packet of a fresh ingredient like that. So there.

Take 2 red onions, halve and slice them before gently frying them in extra virgin olive oil until lightly golden and soft, adding 2 cloves of garlic crushed or chopped after about five minutes of cooking. Meanwhile put 500g of washed baby leaf spinach in a colander over a bowl, sprinkled with a little salt, and massage it well with your finger tips until it has softened and darkened and reduced in bulk. Add the softened spinach mixture to the cooked onion along with the zest and juice of half a lemon, 35g grams of chopped fresh dill, 35 g of chopped fresh parsley (use both the leaf and stalk of these) about 20 fresh mint leaves, chopped, one packet of feta drained and lightly broken up, one tub of ricotta. Mix well, season to taste with salt and pepper.

Amidst the bleak despair at a future of so many Reform led councils, I would like to share with you a quote from the most excellent Prentis Hemphill’s latest episode of their podcast ‘Becoming The People’ which always talks to the challenges of moving through these current times, but with an American perspective, which is, unfortunately becoming increasingly relevant. The following is transcript from spoken word.

“People ask me often “How do you stay hopeful?” And all the time I say “I do not. I do not stay hopeful. [laughs] But I stay in the practice, which is kind of an expression of a faith or a faithfulness. So even when I feel despair, I stay in the question of how even now can I recover the power of my imagination? How, even now, can I look for a path? How even now can I listen for what I haven’t heard before? How even now? And I started to think about how moments where we are completely overwhelmed by our circumstances or the stresses that we are experiencing, how that can condition us into hyper vigilance, which I think a lot of us know, but into a shortened sense of what the future can be. It’s hard to imagine ourselves into the future if we are scanning at all moments, or scanning everywhere we can, for threat. And I was thinking about how important this practice is, especially in this moment where it feels like that is inaccessible to us. I think we can say that’s by design, someone wants that, someone wants to remove that capacity from us. And it’s still our work to figure out - how do I stay in relationship with my imagination?”

In order to be best equipped to fight the good fight I need to be fit and well and so I shall be focussing on imagining a future for myself where I am just that. It may take burning down a few things and saying ‘no’ to clear the way, and I am pleased to reflect that this is no longer something I am afraid of doing. Onwards.

With love & hope,

Chloe x

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As today is a bank holiday it feels tethered via the weekend to last week and so this post is for me, at least psychologically, anchored in the waters of last week and therefore is not late or indeed missing. Why is it important to maintain my weekly posting? Because I am making a commitment this year to writing. To hammering out the memoir I’ve been carrying these last 13 years. If nothing else as a way of clearing the path for other projects. I need for it to be put down, literally and metaphorically.

it is a week of going to the polls in many parts of the UK. Please make sure to vote if you have elections where you live, and to encourage others to do the same. My hope is challenged hugely by the obvious bias in the press towards the far right and the constant manipulation of news stories. I can’t engage any more than that in the here and now. I’ve tried but the sentences dry up while my heart constricts around the mess of it all.

To hope…

It is undoubtedly spring and I learnt two beautiful facts this last week, which inspired hopeful feelings of positivity and a wonder at nature, who will sustain regardless. Green is the colour that we humans can detect the widest variety of, our eyes see myriad variations, and my word but this glorious spring here in East Sussex is doing its best to prove that point. My morning drive along the Lewes Road to work is daily a little more vibrant and variegated than it was the day before.

The other heartening fact I learnt, is that the hawthorn will only flower once all danger of frost has passed - this is something it just knows how to do. The flower of the hawthorn is often called mayflower, as this is the time that it blooms, and it is here that the root of the saying ‘ne’er cast a clout till may is out’ stems from. The ‘may’ we must wait for is the mayflower, its coming out the indicator that the weather will not revert to cool, not as I have long thought the month of May, the saying as I understood it imploring us to not discard our vests before the end of the month. And I can affirm that the mayflower is indeed out, as we have one that towers above our small yard from the neighbouring graveyard, the ground of which is on a level with our first floor, see the picture above.

If you enjoy seasonal produce you will have noticed that the hungry gap is upon us. This is the moment when our veg patches, farms and market gardens have a pause in abundance and crops are sparse. Meanwhile we do have radish and asparagus and the last stems of purple sprouting broccoli to enjoy. And chicory, a leaf I avoided until recently, believing my childhood palette that didn’t like one bit the bitterness of the leaves. I like very much its crisp tang now and urge you to try it if you don’t already eat it. It can be expensive but a little goes a long way, and it pairs so well with the heat of radish and sweetness of broccoli in this very simple salad. I like to steam broccoli until the stems go bright green and soften, but still retain a good bite. While they were cooking I thinly sliced some salad radish and chopped some red chicory into centimetre wide pieces. The dressing was a simple sesame oil and white wine vinegar affair with plenty of salt and pepper, but you can use any dressing you like. A sprinkling of toasted seeds finished it off beautifully.

Hurrah for Spring and salads!

With love & hope,

Chloe x

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The sun is slanting down on the bricks of next door and the cat is pausing, mid leg clean in that way that cats have of freezing as if in terror at an approach that only they can see, a flashed look at an invisible foe, an imperceptible shrug and back on with the lick lick lick of cleaning. I am in bed and very grateful to be so. A big day yesterday of market and catering with an unexpected wing bash of my little car while in stationary traffic on the A27. A motor home caused the damage, not the drivers fault but that of a third party who waved a mouthed ‘sorry!’ from her drivers seat but didn’t stop. All thoughts rushing as I crossed the only moving lane of three at that Falmer spot on the road, pulling up onto the verge, waiting while an ambulance sped by for a break in the traffic to get out, hands shaking a little with the shock of it all. Steve was so kind and apologetic and concerned I went in for a hug, to his horror, and so I backed up and tried not to cry.

Back in the car, details exchanged, to what ends I have no idea, probably none. Grateful for the traffic jam and Steve’s help that made getting back into traffic easier than it otherwise would have been. A little cry and a reflection that thank goodness we hadn’t all been driving at 60mph when that happened and on to the kitchen to cook.

I made 3 different forms of asparagus tart, one vegan tart for which I whizzed up some sun-dried tomatoes and artichoke hearts to make a tasty bed on the puff pastry sheet for the asparagus spears to lie down on, two gluten free and 4 straight as they come. Three salads were assembled, the roasting of the roots, blitzing of the wild garlic and sunflower seed pesto (one nut free guest, one vegan, one dairy free) and the boiling of the Jersey Royal new potatoes had happened the day before. This second salad assembled with a vegan mayonnaise and Dijon mustard dressing, some capers, Kalamata olives and pickled red onions to add as garnish to the finished plate. Then it was just watercress to pick, rocket to rinse and a lettuce head of deep purple leaves to plunge into a full sink of water. A last dressing of dill whizzed with lemon and extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper. Dessert of rhubarb fool and rich chocolate torte to be finished at the venue. Cream to whip and sweeten and to fold Greek yoghurt into, lastly the rhubarbs and orange. Almond and chocolate vegan and gluten free torte to slice. Dairy free cream to pour into baby milk bottles, held back rhubarb for the two who don’t eat dairy. A nut free brownie bought at Florence Road Market, where I had traded in the morning, to plate for our nut free guest.

Yesterday’s market was a milestone, just shy of a year trading in Brighton and I crossed the £200 in takings line (I had crossed this at the Christmas Market, but that doesn’t count). It’s a long time to wait to build to not a huge income, but this is significant for me. When I used to trade at Lewes Farmers Market where I had to have 70% of my products made with local ingredients, I would sell salads and samosas, cakes and biscuits, simply to fulfil this requirement and be able to sell my spices. People seldom bought my spices. My offering was confusing. It was also exhausting, making all that fresh food, getting up at 4am to fold and bake samosa, going home at the end of trading to do a mountain of washing up. I used to dream of having a box of spices and a box of chutney jars. Bowling up, laying them out and simply having to just pack them away ready for the next market at the end of trading. And now I do just that. Once a month in Brighton and once a month, when I can, at the Friday Market here in Lewes. This second commitment is proving harder to keep as catering jobs crop up, guaranteed income that I can’t decline in favour of what I ‘might’ make at market.

You may be thinking ‘£200 isn’t much’ and you would be correct, but when you consider my prices start at £4.50, it’s actually not too bad for 4 hours trading. And it is a growing income. Each month I welcome more return customers - every market seller of products they make themselves knows the joy that this provokes.  ‘Oh my, your Aubergine Moju is delicious, I need to buy 2 jars this month’ is literal music to my ears.

There is a bit of a theme with the £200 mark as this is the amount that our landlord has informed us our rent will go up by in July. Which is nice of him. He’s offered us only legal recourse to dispute it - we go to tribunal and if the rent is found to be higher than market value we won’t have to pay the increase. The rent is below what they could gain if they were to evict us and put the property back on the market, but we believe this to be irrelevant as existing tenants. But the law is the law and with the government finally abolishing clause 21 no fault evictions, I had sensed that something of this sort would come along. Our rent has gone up by £600 a month in 4 years, or 37%. I appreciate that many peoples mortgages have gone up by this amount and more. But these are owned homes, we gain nothing paying rent beyond a roof over our heads. I have no tribunal fight in me. But in these current times of massive destruction, while so many are waking up, bleary eyed, to the realities of the inequality we live in here in the patriarchal, capitalist west, it at least warrants an angry and slightly rude email.

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Meanwhile at Farleys I am having to disappoint many visitors to the house and gallery by refusing to sell them the food they see and smell me cook ‘I’m sorry I can’t sell food from here, you can buy my samosas in the shop though’ will soon be added to with ‘but do take a look at the frozen ready meal board incase you’d like to take something home with you?’ I am planning to add frozen meals to my monthly Friday Food deliveries and to my market offering. I will also be offering a monthly box of spiced goods that can be bought as a one off or subscribed to. I am also applying for work.

A couple of weekends ago myself and Charlie and our friend Ange went to see Akala be interviewed by Lowkey at the Dome in Brighton. They spoke a lot of sense, a lot of truth to power. A lot of plain talking about the situation humanity and the planet is in. The main message I took away is the value of working in education with young people. If you are aware of Akala at all, you may have noticed that he’s not been around much of late - no new music, no Question Time appearances. This is because he’s been writing and more significantly going to prisons and schools to educate people, predominantly men, young men and boys. I am a qualified teacher and love teaching. I am looking for a part time teaching job - please do get in touch if you hear of anything. I have applied for one that I would dearly love to get - keep your fingers crossed! A part time income could gain say £1500 a month…if I were to generate that level of income from my business, it would cost me nearly half that to make the income. Speculating to accumulate is exhausting. The working life I want is one where I have a set income based on fixed hours that leaves me time to offer my once monthly Friday Food, my once monthly market and spice subscriptions and wholesale orders, all topped off with very occasional catering work. It should be possible - wish me luck!

For any of you local to Water Lane in Hawkhurst, I will be trading at their next Food & Flea on May 2nd and 3rd. It’s a new event for me, it costs £5 to visit the walled garden where the market is situated, dogs are welcome and kids go for free. It looks like a really great event and the weather is looking promising - do come by and say hello if you visit.

With love & hope,

Chloe x

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Last Saturdays Food in Print Fair was a day of pure joy and inspiration and I want to start this weeks news with heartfelt thanks to all my paid subscribers who made Hope’s Kitchen the Fanzine come into being. As I told many people at the fair, I put a paywall on my Substack back in January 2024 but it never sat quite right with me. Having a hierarchy of access to recipes published online based on financial stability felt wrong, plus the pressure of responsibility it placed on me was heavy, and so I took it down explaining my reasoning and stating that I would keep the paid subscriber option there as a self imposed tax for any reading and enjoying my newsletter to pay, knowing that by doing so they were enabling me to justify doing more writing. This went really well, and instead of losing paid subscribers as I feared I might, I actually gained a few more! You can read my original statement here.

Fast forward to a little longer than a year later and the continuing genocide in Palestine was sitting heavy on everything along with the dawning realisation that it would not stop until Gaza no longer existed and that it would lead to yet more war, destruction and land and asset theft in the region (and here we are). At the time in early spring of 2025 I had an overwhelming desire to make something, to drop my phone into oblivion and put pen to actual paper and draw, and knit and read books, all of which I did, and it helped soothe my nervous system a lot. And it was in the middle of this flurry of inspiration that I thought, oooo, I could make a little fanzine and send it to my paid subscribers by way of a thank you, and so Hope’s Kitchen the fanzine was born.

It was always my intention to keep it a low fi, art led, community based project, meaning that she and I were both a little out of our depth at the Food in Print Fair, but it really didn’t matter one bit, we had a lovely time. Many of the other zines on sale were full to bursting with food writing by writers of widely varying experience and background. I met zine makers from Thailand and Japan, Scotland, Ireland, America, Germany - all people inspired by the craziness of now to self publish often hand designed magazines frequently focussing on niche areas of the food world. It was magical and exciting and I am so glad that I was brave enough to go.

This last week has been one of recovering from the efforts of that beaut’ of a day up in London, while grappling the news (BBC investigations and online rape schools anyone?) while also worrying not inconsiderably about the viability of my micro food business during the mounting financial insecurities caused by the wars that are raging. Oh and a 10% domestic rent increase. You will be glad that I didn’t post here the first 2,000 words that I wrote! There was no food and very little hope!

At the kitchen my garden is fulfilling all my dreams for the year so far. I was disappointed last year that I had no flowers until late March, and then not many to speak of. This year I have had a wealth of blooms already, the tulips pictured being a great success, I shall definitely be planting more next year. I very much hope to welcome some people on May 9th for my first kitchen pop up of the year, as yet I have just 2 bookings - paid subscribers who want to come do email me for the 10% off discount code, or comment below and I shall ping it over to you..

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Back to a little bit about my earlier paid Substack offering, Weekend Wonders, One Meal Endless Flavour. This was born out of a bid to gain squillions of paid subscribers and become a full time food writer, based on the fact that this was a growing phenomenon on the platform. What I hadn’t factored in was that many of the people doing this successfully where and always had been full time food writers or were people without jobs who started their Substacks and hit gold, while they were subsidised commonly by a partner earning for the household costs. It didn’t occur to me that squeezing, as promised, a whole meals worth of recipes a week into my already full time work schedule, might be a bit of a drain. At first I was able to rely on my store of pre written recipes, but once that ran low I was under pressure and it was not fun. Having people pay for the content added massively to the burden of pressure, which combined with my previously mentioned concerns about hierarchies of access and so I ceased Weekend Wonders (again, you can read my original statement here). And then the other week I went and did a thing I am prone to do, I went and promised it would return, and once again the pressure built.

Platforms like Instagram and now Substack squeeze what is left by grind culture out of creatives, all of us hopefully chasing the capitalist dream of achieving a level of status through followers and subscribers, paid or otherwise, that will allow us to go further in our chosen industries – I would dearly like to write professionally, I have a book in progress, but it being memoir based rather than fiction means that unless it is an astonishing and obviously brilliant piece of unique writing, I am confidently told again and again that to get an agent and publisher, I must prove interest in my words through follower counts and that to be even remotely viable they must be at least in the tens of thousands, preferably significantly higher.

But I don’t have time to ‘work’ my social media when the algorithms change the tune we dance to regularly, I have to do the work bit of my work that gets the money to pay the rent and so it goes.

Weekend Wonders will not return, but there will be regular recipes, like the two below, which work beautifully together and are fun and easy to make. Aloo (potatoes) Gobi (cauliflower) is called by its Indian name because it is flavoured with Indian spices. It can serve as a main dish or a side. The wild garlic chutney is yet another version of whizzed up ‘green’ chutney, again another thing found in many Indian cookery books and where I gained my inspiration. It is that time of year again, when the waterside verges abound with wild garlic. You should find it in quantity at local farmers markets or in your vegetable box delivery. If you are foraging then please do take only what you need, pick gently and carefully without pulling up the root stock and leave plenty for the plants health and for others to enjoy.

Happy cooking.

With love & hope,

Chloe x

It is two years since our Noa flew to Australia. Two years! When they pop back for a visit in June they will do so as a 21 year old who has been living and working independently on the other side of the world since they were 19, there will doubtless be some changes to note. As you can imagine I have already been planning what to feed them on their return, it makes my heart near explode with joy to think of cooking for them again after so long. I wonder what Noa might cook up for us?!

This photo of the two of us was taken 12 years ago, one and a half years into Noa’s two and a half years of chemo for non Hodgkin’s lymphoma and a month shy of me releasing my pram onto the streets of Lewes and launching my home prepared Friday Food Deliveries. Later today I shall send out the menu for this month’s Friday Food Delivery.

Today I am travelling to London with my fanzine named, as is this newsletter, Hope’s Kitchen. It is, beyond writing on this platform and sending out Issue 1 of the fanzine to my paid subscribers, it’s first public outing. The first time I will be standing up next to it, hopefully talking to people about it, and so I thought a good warm up might be to tap out this newsletter on my phone. It is also the first time I have ever placed myself professionally amongst a room full of food writers, many well established in their careers who are known for their writing and are paid for it. Literally living my dream. So far I am managing to channel my nerves into excitement.

Hope’s Kitchen is the working title of the book I’ve been writing since 2012, when my flight response to Noa’s diagnosis drove me to the kitchen and the comfort of pots and pans. There has been so much that has happened in the preceding years that what I first intended to be simply a guide book for parents navigating a child’s cancer diagnosis has metamorphosed into being about so much more. It’s a muddle a lot of the time, but this is the year that I am determined to hammer it into some sort of form and take it into the world and just see.

And now to the narrative arc I came here to practice before my day at the Food in Print Fair - poster with details below. I have made a story board of sorts to have on my stand to work as a visual aid to the storytelling, and here are the mental notes that I shall be referring to….

Back in 1996 I graduated with a degree in Fine Art Textiles, and because it was the mid nineties I was lucky to be able to live in London and rent a studio at Cockpit Arts in which to make the bags and purses I fell into making the summer after graduating. Consistent income from this endeavour was seldom forthcoming, and so I worked occasionally for a caterer, at first as a waitress but eventually in the kitchen. I really enjoyed being in the kitchen and as I watched the owners business ride out the numerous economic inconsistencies of the latter part of the 20th century I remember thinking ‘hmmm, this is a good business model. Much like undertaking, there is a constant human need for these services’ and so a small seed was planted.

Meanwhile our two children were born and I left my studio, promising myself I would have a dedicated work space again one day, and I retrained, learning BSL and working first as in class support to deaf adult learners and ultimately undertaking teacher training and becoming a language support tutor to deaf adults in arts education. I loved my work. We had moved to Lewes in 2010 and my heartache at the absence of all the food glory of my home town of London and it’s many immigrant communities had led me to the kitchen with very specific aims - learning to cook with spices.

And so I was a commuter with a 5 year old and 7 year old, working part time and cooking a lot when Noa’s cancer diagnosis landed like an asteroid onto our lives and altered everything.

Writing this now I am suffused with gratitude at her wellness and at the fact of the opportunity that this devastation caused. I found myself at home, thanks to a life insurance policy that miraculously paid out in the case of critical illness of a child, and I found myself in the kitchen. I turned there principally because I couldn’t be Noa’s medical professional, which I found really hard, I had to let that part of her care go to a degree. But I could keep her well through cooking. And so this is when I first started cooking in hope, pouring love and hope into everything I prepared. We were renting a house with an aga at the time, a big red constantly warm beast of an oven in the basement kitchen. And this kitchen and its permanent warmth was a big part of getting us all through that first winter.

It soon became obvious that I was cooking more than we needed, and in short I decided to register the kitchen with the council and start my micro food business. Along came my silver cross pram conversion and my Friday deliveries. Catering work followed, as did a range of spices and other larder products. In 2017 my work with spices food brought me to the attention of Ami Bouhassane, granddaughter of Lee Miller. Lee Miller who had returned from her time working as a frontline photographer accompanying American troops in World War Two to bury her associated and undiagnosed PTSD in part in cooking in a farmhouse in East Sussex. In a kitchen with a raeburn that Lee later replaced with a big white Ava. Ami had written a book, Lee Miller, A Life With Food, Friends and Recipes and was looking for a local caterer to interpret some of Lee’s recipes into canapés for the launch. Miraculously someone put my name forward.

Today I have my dedicated creative workspace, it is a kitchen in an old pig sty on Farleys Farm. I teach workshops in Lee Millers kitchen, using her aga to make up her recipes with visitors and it is work that I absolutely love. I also cater group lunches for visits to Farleys House and Gallery, which is open to the public 3 days a week from April to October. I honestly pinch myself everyday. I feel like I have come full circle from art school, to kitchen, to kitchen in an arts space. Look what hopeful cooking made!

And this is what I want to write about. All of it. Part memoir, part recipe book, part guide to generating hope when circumstances feel far from hopeful.

For the recipe lovers of you, apologies for the absence this week, I plead extenuating circumstances! Weekend Wonders next week, (although I’m dropping the title, more on that next week) with a collection of recipes for you to enjoy.

If you would like to receive a copy of Issue 2 of Hope’s Kitchen, become a paid subscriber and one will be mailed out to you. Paid subscribers receive my fanzine and recipe booklets through the post, and occasional discounts on products, workshops and events. The zine will also be listed online for sale next week

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Thanks as ever for reading,

Chloe x

All week I have been deliberating whether or not to make hot cross buns, the only reason against making them being the fact that if I do then I will of course, inevitably, eat them. In the end I actively needed to make them by the time Thursday morning came around, a week of difficult news both world-wide and personally saw me reach for my favourite comfort blanket, cooking, but more specifically baking and then sharing what I’ve baked. There is something about acute upset that forges a need in me to connect with people on a very human level, I get an overwhelming urge to feed them. And to preferably feed them treats. I think there is a gossamer thin line between sadness and love, and often the one is comforted by an expression of the other. For my hot cross buns I returned to this old favourite recipe by Paul Hollywood, and made them a little less indulgent by using 100g of wholemeal flour in the mix and omitting the apricot glaze.

I was the lucky beneficiary of my friend Philippa’s glut of rhubarb recently, as used in last weeks sweet treat recipe suggestion, and after setting the buns on their first rise, it was to this generous gift that I turned again this week. I had some ready rolled puff pastry left from a canapé job that needed eating and the pastry and rhubarb met well with a desire to have a play with sugar, almonds and tahini as inspired by fellow Substack food writer Sophia Real, who posted a note a while back about using tahini while making frangipane – genius! I have been wanting to have a play with those flavours myself ever since and these tarts are the result.

You could always make one large tart instead of 8 individual ones. You could also top the tahini and almond mixture with apples, pears, apricots, plums…. If you like your bakes sweet sweet, you may want to increase the amount of the paste mixture - these are gently sweet, allowing the tartness of the rhubarb to come through. Recipe below.

Next week I am taking my fledgling ‘zine Hope’s Kitchen, to London for the first ever Food in Print Fair and I am terrified and excited in equal measure. Fellow exhibitors include people whose work I have read and admired for some time. I will be properly pulling on my big girl pants before going. I did well yesterday - kept reminding myself that my offering is uniquely mine, that it has value of its own, that I know what I am working at communicating with the world at large. Today I decided that they have offered me a stand by mistake and I should probably let them know. It is one thing to prattle away into the ether from the dark quiet of my armchair, quite another to do it for real, in public, amongst strangers. Paid subscribers will be pleased to hear that regardless of my stage fright, the fair means that Issue 2 of Hope’s Kitchen the fanzine simply has to be finished by the end of next week and should be with you all early the week after. There are 5 paid subscribers who I have not received replies from when I have asked for their addresses, if this is you then please do get in touch sevensistersspices@yahoo.co.uk.

More good news for paid subscribers is I have finally been given the okay on some dates for pop ups in a new space in the yard at Farleys. I have known that I will have access to this space since October, it feels wonderful to finally be able to put the news out there. Having a large empty room adjacent to my kitchen, indeed with a doorway through to it, will offer a number of opportunities to hopefully bolster my micro food business through the coming and current economic storm. Here is a link to a short video I shared to Instagram for you to get an idea of the space and its value. Paid subscribers who would like to come along to my long table pop ups on the evenings of May 9th or June 20th will get 10% off the ticket price, please email me for the discount code. You can find out details of the events here, menus to be confirmed. So you see, now is a most excellent time to become a paid subscriber! It doesn’t get you anything extra here on the Substack platform, but it does get you post, discounts and a warm glow from knowing how very much it means to me to have your financial support for my work.

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As ever thank you for reading and happy cooking,

Chloe x

It is a beautiful moment when both rhubarb and wild garlic are on the kitchen bench, if only they worked together as well on the palate as they do on the eyes! Over the last few weeks I have twice made a rhubarb and blood orange upside down cake for clients, on the first occasion I was in attendance and so was able to taste it and can assure you that it was delicious! It is also vegan and gluten free, so a bit of a ‘win win’. I used this Nigella Lawson recipe for the cake part, swapping out the lemon for blood orange. As you can see from the pictures below, I cut my rhubarb spears to fit snuggly inside my 23cm cake tin – I recommend cutting any thick stalks in half along their length, as rhubarb is a wet fruit when cooked, and whole thick stalks might be a little too much. I first lined my cake tin with greaseproof paper, making sure that the circle was a good centimetre larger in diameter than the tin so that there would be a lip around the cake while it cooked. I then sprinkled a heaped tablespoon of light brown sugar over the paper and added to that the zest of half a blood orange. Once I was happy with the even dispersal of the zest and sugar, I laid the rhubarb on top, lastly gently covering it all with the cake mixture. The moisture added by the rhubarb means you will need to extend the cooking time by about ten minutes. You also want to let the cake cool completely in the tin before turning it out, it is a very fragile thing when warm. This cake is delicious but can look a little messy around the edges, this is best disguised by sprinkling it with some icing sugar just as you serve it.

Well, here we are again and before we go any further I must offer an apology for last weeks’ absence to any who may have noticed. Today I have put on shoes and left the house for the first time since Saturday when my body fully succumbed to a most unpleasant virus that I realise I had been fighting for a while. Yuk. Lordy, but it feels good to feel a bit better. And so yes, I missed publication day last week, but here we all are (I hope) and so on we go…

Further adventures in bread making… I was one of a mere handful of people who didn’t go all out for sourdough baking during lockdown, I am only learning now how soothing and holding this practice is. At first my brain was in a paralysis of not really knowing what I was doing and being tied so tightly to the instructions of others that I couldn’t fully relax into the process, but that moment has passed. I can now throw out terms like ‘coil fold’ and ‘autolyse’ in full confidence of knowing what the hell I am on about. But my loaves over 5 bakes have steadily declined, why has this happened?

I blamed the flour, the heat of the kitchen, too much water, not enough water…. However, following an excellent 45 minute online workshop with Andra Stefanescu on Sunday, it turns out that I have allowed my enthusiasm for the bread making part to dominate and I have neglected my starter – believe me, this is a huge bloody metaphor.

The foundation of a good loaf of sourdough bread is, of course, the starter. But as a novice, as soon as I had established that I could bake delicious bread with a good rise from the starter I had made, I foolishly gave little thought to its maintenance and health. And I realise that this is a pattern of mine.

I eat well and exercise for long enough to feel good, and then somewhere in my head I allow myself to believe that this good practice will somehow magically maintain itself, even if I am not actually doing it.

When I eat a diet of mostly vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans and pulses with low to no alcohol, occasional white meat and fish, no processed carbs and low sugar, I feel grand. I sleep well, I suffer no IBS, I feel comfortable in my clothes. Can anyone enlighten me as to why it is that I know this, have known this for many years and yet I am incapable of maintaining such a lifestyle?

Today I embarked once more on eating this way. I can find all sorts of things and people to scape goat, but the bottom line is my reluctance to take responsibility for myself – I am far from alone in this. Why do we do it? One thing I do know, stress is always my undoing. Stress and anxiety lead me firmly by the hand to a glass of wine and chocolate, buttery toast and jam for comfort, lazy quick dinner hacks of pasta and not much else. The major problem here is that these ways lead to further stress, bringing with them as they do an increase in challenging symptoms, and so round and round I go. There is hope in the observation of this habit being made, however, and hope to be found elsewhere..

One of my joys this year so far has been discovering that you can regain the ability to read. I was an avid reader through childhood and beyond, right up to having kids, since when my skills in that department have been poor. I despaired at ever being able to stay awake for longer than half a page of a standard print format novel, but now I can sit up reading till way past midnight. This has made me so happy and is a lesson I am carrying with me and regularly reminding myself of. If this year begins with me regaining my reading powers, then it can continue with me laying down strong new muscles in other areas too, based simply on the fact that I want them to grow.

My first disappointing loaves happened last week. I was having such a great time making the bread that day. It was my first time doing so at the work kitchen and I found the way the timed folds and stretches punctuated the day was making me really efficient in-between times, quite a revelation, the bread making actually enhancing my work practice rather than detracting or distracting from it. When it came to the baking however, my dough just didn’t have the strength necessary to rise up, either in the proving basket or in the oven. It was a sad, limp, drooping thing and even when fully baked had a wetness to its texture. Thanks to Andra I am now focussing on rebuilding my starters (yes I have 2, one at home and one in the kitchen) and committing to discarding some daily, which I really struggle with as it feels so wasteful, but I see now that it is a necessary part of the process. These starters are hungry beasts. They must be fed, and they benefit from a higher ratio of fresh flour and water to the starter itself - at the moment I am daily feeding 50g of starter with 100g each of water and flour, they are bubbling away happily and I hope to bake again before the weekend. Water is also important, I had lapsed to using tap and realise that I need to use a good quality, lively, still mineral water. Did you listen to the Food Programme that was all about water? A fascinating listen that I highly recommend if not. I started the programme all scoffing derision, but ended with quite a different opinion, listen to it here.

Amidst everything I hope, as ever, that you are well. I am looking forward to sharing some exciting updates with you next week, and hopefully some positive bread news!

With love,

Chloe x