The rain has been relentless. Today a friend shared a newspaper artist’s impression of animals peering two by two out of a floating Noah’s ark, and a sign over the floodwaters reading ‘Welcome to Exeter’. According to the accompanying report published in The Times, ‘Britain has been deluged with rain for 40 days straight and the biblical weather is set to continue’. It’s been too rainy here to go outside really, without being kitted out from top to toe in waterproof clothing. And as that kind of thing does not, alas, feature in my wardrobe, apart from a recent dash through a drenched Dublin to see the Turner as Inspiration exhibition, and similar dashes into a drenched Belfast to teach my classes, I’ve spent more time than usual happily ensconced in my kitchen. And that brings me to my point: kitchen inspiration.
There’s no better time than a rainy day (drum roll) to announce a new blog series! Pardon the pun if you will, but this one has been bubbling away on the back burner for a while now. I wanted to call it ‘My Kitchen Diary’ or something like that. But Nigel Slater beat me to it with his fabulous Kitchen Diaries. So I plumped for ‘Kitchen Inspiration’ instead. I needed to find a title that is sufficiently broad to catch all of the fun that I envisage for this series: expect updates on my current foray into bread-making; reviews of the gorgeous cook books that feature on my kitchen shelf; meditations on the topic of hospitality; literary and Scriptural representations of food and feasting; selected poetry reflecting traditions of hearth and home from Ireland and further afield. There might be a Creative Conversation or two, a guest takeover maybe, and perhaps even an occasional recipe. Funnily enough, one of my most popular posts on this blog to date featured my Mum’s home-made Northern Irish wheaten bread …
By the way, I love my kitchen. It’s a kind of cocoon. It doesn’t have far-reaching views of rolling landscapes, but it faces south, and when the sun is out, it is bright and warm and cheery. It looks out into our garden, a place filled with family memories. In fact that little patch of earth has provided countless hours of solace in all seasons – and not just for our dog and cat!
Now then, have these words of introduction whetted your appetite?
Some of my readers will already enjoy my friend Malcolm Guite’s Spell in the Library series on YouTube. If you haven’t paid a visit yet, you should. At the start of each episode Malcolm invites the viewer to step inside the door of his study, a veritable treasure trove packed with books and art. Malcolm then settles into a comfy chair, a good drink in hand, lights up his pipe, and waxes lyrical about the treasures on his bookshelf and his mantelpiece. It’s brilliant.
I can promise you, I won’t be lighting up a pipe. But in my Kitchen Inspiration series, I’ll be inviting you to join me in the inner sanctum of my domestic universe. My plan is to serve up some regular helpings of sunny inspiration, even on rainy days: short reads inspired by kitchen life that might just go down very nicely with a good cup of tea or coffee. And maybe even a wee bun.
Kitchen Inspiration: provisions and pancakes
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