Kitchen Alchemy

When I was a kid I ate a lot of eggs. Both my mother and my father served them up to me in all manner of ways – soft boiled, as omelettes, and scrambled. I think my favourite might have been soft boiled, but only because Mum also made me very excellent toast soldiers slathered in butter to dip into the runny egg yolk. Yuk! I would never eat such a thing now. I had a bad run in with eggs in the late seventies, thanks to my Mum taking up a job as an egg collector on a Steggles Chicken farm. That job knocked two stone off my mother’s figure in a matter of weeks! It was totally hard yakka – dirty, hot and the chickens, especially the roosters, were not friendly in the slightest. Mum came home one time with a massive gouge down the side of her face – a rooster had gone for her and sliced her cheek open with one of its claws. She didn’t need stitches, thank God, but the attacker left his mark. Even after all these years, there’s still a feint line across Mum’s cheek. Mum used to...

When I was a kid we lived in a part of Newcastle that backed onto a massive expanse of paddocks and swamp. Our neighbours kept horses and cows in those paddocks, so we were lucky enough to grow up and a bona fide built up area with more than a little bit of country sensibility included. Despite this, and contrary to the desires of so many little girls, I did not spend my childhood pestering my parents for a pony. More over, I never even asked any of my neighbours if I might ride one of their horses. They were for looking at and feeding. Nothing else. One horse in particular, Boomerang, seemed to me to distinctly be the kind of horse one should never ride. My mother, my sister and I squeezed through the gate in the back fence one afternoon with the intention of feeding Boomerang and a couple of the other horses some apples that had gone soft. Unfortunately for us, Boomerang spotted the apples in our hands and came galloping towards us at a rate of knots. When we realised he wo...