November is for Norfolk...

November is for Norfolk. I’ve been peripatetic for long enough so I’m having a month here and not budging. (Except for a little jaunt to Ireland). I’m giving up cooking and I’m going to be an artist instead. There’s a sweet little village hall in Hempstead where there’s a charcoaling class each Tuesday and pottery classes in another village hall on Tuesday evenings and Thursday afternoons. All at a snip. Perfect. So this month is reserved for the noble arts…

Soweto Kinch came to play in Norwich and I was delighted. I’d heard a lot about him (being a few years below him at school), so seeing that he’d travelled East (like kings and wise people) I went to see him. What a proper proper star. An endearing star. He’s an ultra talented mix of Jazz and hip hop. A jaw-dropping saxophonist and laughably clever MC. Equally brilliant were Karl Racheed-Abel (double bass) and Shaney Forbes (drums). They were promoting his new Dante-inspired studio album ‘The Legend of Mike Smith’. It’s theme is The Seven Deadly Sins. One of the best tracks, appropriately, is ‘Gula’ – Latin for gluttony. I wonder if I can download it and somehow have it as a soundtrack to my diary..

http://www.londonjazzfestival.org.uk/event/soweto-kinch-1
http://soweto-kinch.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soweto_Kinch

There’s a sort of pop-up restaurant that does it’s thing and pops up around Itteringham every month or so. This time it was at Mannington Hall, so merrily I went with the little Plumstead clan. It was Norfolk mussels to start…. slurp, chew, slurp, chew….  then… huh, what’s that?…. Oh my lor…. it can’t be… but I think it is….. yep, I HAVE A PEARL IN MY MOUTH!! And I did. A real Norfolk mussel pearl. Not a fresh water mussel. A sea mussel. A Norfolk pearl. Apparently I have a ‘Scooby-doo look’, and I pulled it. Wowee, I was SO happy. It’s creamy and like a tic-tac. A little smaller than a tic-tac. It looks like the moon did when we arrived at moated Mannington (below pic). I’m going to set it in gold. I think it’s a harbinger. An augury that something special is just around the corner…

In accordance with my November rule, I’m NOT cooking. But, I do notice that the alexanders are coming up in the hedgerow and I fancy a steak. So an exception is made and I make a highly seasonal meal of sirloin steak, roasted home-picked chestnuts, purple kale and alexander hollandaise. Apart from that (and a jolly local dinner party that featured Norfolk brown shrimp and crab bisque, the estate’s partridge and a big baked Alaska) I’ve done (barely) no cooking for nearly a month, hurrah, hurrah...