In the soup.......

I took on board a wonderfully simple piece of advice, today, from the pen of Bernard Malamud – “You write by sitting down and writing”. I’ve been writing my book for the last 4 months. The book grows, but is still some way from completion. This may be because each time I sit down and write, the very words I am writing make me get up to take a photograph or cook something. The book is about food, photography and France. That being the case there is no real beginning or end to the book, as the three subjects are limitless. I could follow the apocryphal story of the painter John Bratby who was said to have weighed his paintings to see if they were finished. This is trickier with a computer. While I think of a number between 200 and 250, as a limit to the number of pages in the book, I am going to make a cabbage soup from Nigel Slater’s book “Tender”. I have never before made cabbage soup, and neither have I wanted to, but I happen to have a fabulous cabbage in the kitchen and some potatoes. The recipe also demands chorizo, which I do not have, so some imaginative substitution is going to happen which will probably involve chillies and pancetta.

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