This article was written for Annabel & Grace, which is now part of Rest Less.
Janet Gordon is back with some holiday reads for this Summer and a cookery book that is right up my street with so many recipes for leftovers.
The Art of Friday Night Dinner by Eleanor Steafel (Bloomsbury Publishing)
My first husband used to tell me what a terrible cook I was, and so, of course, the legend in our family grew that Janet couldn’t cook, and to be honest, I’ve always believed it.
However, husband No 2. Malcolm is quite insistent that I am a terrific cook – he admits that complicated cakes don’t always turn out quite as they should be and that none of my gefilte fish balls is the same size, but he says that just adds to the charm. Aaaaah, isn’t he lovely?
And in fact, one of my most successful recipes is a variation of Dan Dan Noodles – Jan Jan Noodles. We call it because it utilises leftover meat, which darling hubby minces for me and the only ingredients that stay the same are ginger, garlic and crunchy peanut butter – but it’s definitely one of our fave meals and a great way to use up any leftover anything.
So I was delighted when The Art of Friday Night Dinner landed on my doormat. It’s a wow of a book packed with all kinds of let’s use up fridge food leftovers. There’s a recipe if you just want to crash on the sofa or if you want to impress dinner guests and all accompanied by pithy and funny stories about just how and why.
There’s also a recipe for “sexy steak” and chips with far too much Bearnaise sauce or describing her “coming-home” rituals.
Don’t know about you, but the first thing I do when I get home is rip off my bra, then shoes and jewellery and pop on pyjamas. Then I’m home.
It’s such a lovely cookery read.
Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson (Hutchinson )
Do any of you remember that wonderful TV show with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, “The Unforgiven” – she wore all those beautiful clothes and he was the unfaithful doctor/husband – there was a beautiful New York brownstone house and a “cottage” in The Hamptons and acres of gorgeous scenery.
Well, Pineapple Street is sort of the literary equivalent.
This is much more than a “take three girls” type read following the lives of the very WASP-y (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) Stockton family. The three daughters, Darley, Sasha and Georgiana are all so used to having oodles of money that they don’t even think anything of it. They own acres of New York, a country “cottage” for summer in The Hamptons, and Mama Stockton loves to throw themed dinner parties. The one thing they aren’t, though is happy.
Darley is married to Michael, Sasha is married to Cord and is forced to live in the big house on Pineapple Street surrounded by everything the Stocktons will never throw away, and Georgiana loses the love of her life. Can their money cocoon them, or is it the root of all their unhappiness?
This is a big USA hit and is set to be a best-seller over here.
Maybe Tomorrow by Penny Parkes (Simon & Schuster)
Shopping the other day, I spied a queue for the local Food Bank. In my naivety, I hadn’t actually realised that you couldn’t just walk straight in. To be honest, whenever I do a supermarket “big shop”, I do try to pop something into the collection box. And if you are given a freebie coupon – and it’s quite often a coupon for incontinence products, and you don’t need them, I normally get them anyway and also pop them in the box.
All this leads up to Penny Parkes’s latest “Maybe Tomorrow”, and oh my goodness, does this tug at the heartstrings. Ms Parkes has written a series of novels about life in a GP’s surgery, with the first being “Out of Practice”, but this is so different. It’s set around the local food bank.
Jamie Matson started a travel agency along with her friend organising trips for single-parent families, which sadly closed with the advent of lockdown. A single mother herself, she lives with her son ten-year-old Bo, in a mould-ridden one-bedroom dump with a leery landlord and has managed to find minimum wage employment in a local deli, presided over by a bully-type owner.
Jamie is in despair, with no savings, and with Bo, who she knows deep down is on the spectrum, but who has a wonderful artistic flair and a singular talent for keeping Jamie going, but who has severe asthma necessitating many, many emergency late night visits to A&E for treatment. She has to keep this job. Until the day when Jamie comes home to find leery landlord inside her flat with a pair of her lacy knickers hanging out of a trouser pocket. He serves Jamie notice, giving her just a few short days to find somewhere else to live. And then, having spent the night in A&E with Bo but forced to come into work, the bully boss sacks her after an out-of-control child (whose mother spends a lot of money in the deli) deliberately swipes bottles of expensive oils off the shelf and then accuses Jamie of pushing him. A kindly elderly lady tries to intervene to explain what has happened, but the bully boss refuses to listen.
Jamie, who normally sneaks into the Food Bank feeling totally ashamed and embarrassed, turns up there at a totally different time from her usual visit. And there she meets Kath, the A&E Nurse that had looked after Bo the previous night and whose abusive husband works away on the oil rigs; Amy, struggling to hold back tears after being turned down for yet another entry-level job and Bonnie, trying desperately to get her little booth of a hairdresser off the ground.
This totally disparate group bond and become friends. Joined by Ruth – the elderly lady whom Jamie had met in the deli and Harry, her husband, who realises Jamie’s plight and offers her the job of housekeeper/companion/carer – Ruth thinks Harry needs care, but Harry is definite that it’s Ruth who needs looking after. And so Jamie – and Bo – move into Harry and Ruth’s annexe.
And so the group all bond over at Ruth and Harry’s wonderful ex-school house home, meaning that the house is now filled with love and laughter
I was actually in tears reading this. To be honest, I’ve been there – when my son Daniel was just a baby, I was living in a wreck of a house in Westcliff, Essex and having to choose between baked beans on toast or just toast. But with help and managing to get a decent job, I worked my way out of it, and now the thought that this is a reality for so many people drives me to despair.
This is such a lovely story, and yes, there may well be a happy ending.
The End of Us by Olivia Kiernan (Riverrun)
You know how it is, you move into a new house in a select cul-de-sac, and you say hello to the neighbours as you spot them going about their business. And so when Myles and Lana move in, they nod and smile to their neighbours Gabriel and Holly Wright.
They seem such a glamorous, sophisticated couple, and Myles and Lana are impressed, particularly as Myles has definitely overreached himself to afford their big new house. And when an investment fails, it looks as if they will have to bring their new would-be lifestyle to an end.
So over drinks, Gabriel and Holly listen with a sympathetic ear to their worries and when Gabriel suggests a solution – with a cut for him and Holly – Myles is unsure whether or not this is an elaborate joke – or are they for real? But then Lana doesn’t come home.
Oh my goodness, what a twisty turny complex dark, dark plot – and very, very clever.