I went shopping last week and bought a tagine and one of those brilliant iron pans with short handles which can be used on top of the stove and then in the oven. Brilliant except for the hand burns when you take it out.
The tagine made an excellent shoulder of lamb done with herbs, harissa, honey and lemon juice. Tour de France food, now the tele is fixed. And with the clever (except for the burns) pan, I made a pear tarte tatin. It's ridiculously easy and that it has taken decades to embrace means at least a few years longer to live. We ate it with a crème anglaise and ice cream. The Tour is exhausting and the weight peels off just watching.
It all started with a visit to M's a few days before. S (she's a fine cook) was down to stay and help pack as M has sold and is moving into a very comfortable house where she is prepared to end her life. I don't mean actively. Perhaps finish would be a better word.
Anyway, M has a great tagine (quite large and with burny handles, though they're good for carrying it to the table) and an even better brilliant pan for Tartes because it only has one handle which apart from halving the number of burnt hands makes it is easier to flip the cooked tarte over onto its serving plate.
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The main reason for dinner was that M had been to a new clairvoyant and wanted to talk. The session (no ouija boards and head scarves, but rather more empathy and trust) had touched on issues long unresolved and in the retelling tears rolled. She somehow was guided through, or taken back into, dark corners about her natural mother giving her up for adoption as an infant, the difficulties with her new parents and surprisingly (for me at least) especially with her adoptive mother, the cruelty of sibling rivalry, and not least the complete absence of any information about her natural father other than 'he done her wrong'.
What emerged, and made her sob again, was the news, if it was news, that she had been loved at all. Actually, it wasn't so much loved as when she felt safe. That she knew strongly: that with him, or her, or here, or there, she felt safe. I wonder now what is the difference. I think you are loved and love when someone is completely safe with you, and you with them. Completely.
Strangely, also last week during our regular midweek dinner with K's mother in Sydney she had gone on and on about her past, her three marriages, and things I'd preferred not to have heard, really. Suddenly in the middle of it she stared at me and said: 'Don't we love each other so, that we can say all these things openly to each other'. I think she felt safe.
