Bad Cook - Esther Walker

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      Whenever my husband has done something annoying and I feel enervated, I always run those lists through my head. It’s what my marriage balances on, like a fat elephant on a plank of wood on a ball bearing.

      But a few years ago, I realized that my husband was NOT aware that there was this careful balancing act going on. He did not think, as he ignored my throat-clearing, cuticle-picking, death-staring grotesqueness, that he was simply keeping up his end of the bargain. He believed that he was bearing the brunt of marital irritation, while I sailed through life blithely un-irritated. One day, things exploded in a terrible row about me not making the bed.

      I won’t lie, there were tears.

      Then I explained about the list. About the importance of acts of devotion. And he got it, more or less. And that’s why I’m always sorting out dinner; it’s part of the deal. It’s why I try to find new things to cook, rather than just doing a roast chicken or pasta over and over again. If it’s going to be my area, I might as well have a big repertoire. It makes everything easier.

      Which explains why I tried out this lamb shank curry. Yes, fine, it’s just another bloody curry, but the appealing thing about this to me was that it is tomato-based and therefore unusual and new and exciting.

      Lamb Shank Curry

      Serves 2

       1 large onion, chopped

       2 ripe tomatoes, or a generous handful of cherry or vine tomatoes

       1 tsp cumin powder

       1 red chilli

       2 cloves garlic

       1 tbsp fresh ginger

       1 tsp turmeric

       1 tbsp brown sugar

       2 lamb shanks

       small bunch fresh coriander

      1 Preheat the oven to 150ºC.

      2 Blend everything except the lamb shanks and half the coriander in a whizzer to make a paste then slap it over the lamb shanks and leave for as long as you can. All day, ideally, but an hour will make a difference.

      3 Heat a bit of groundnut oil in a big casserole and tip in the lamb and the marinade. Cook for 90 mins. Turn occasionally if you can be bothered. Garnish with a bit of fresh coriander to serve, while you ponder the secrets of marital bliss.

      Connie’s Mango Salsa

      Let’s go now. Let’s fly you and I away from this gloomy now, to a different time, back six years, to when I was working on Londoner’s Diary, which as I’m sure you know is the gossip page of the Evening Standard.

      One day a new girl appeared in the editor’s office. The editor liked to have a lot of girls around and she was very mean to all of them. She thought she was in The Devil Wears Prada or something and that being mean to your assistants is terribly glamorous, but we knew that we were actually in a scummy daily newspaper office in West London and that people who are mean to their assistants are bitches who will rot in hell.

      The editor’s girls didn’t usually last. They all had office affairs eventually, which then went sour, then they went on sick leave, then never came back. But Connie, or ‘Beautiful Connie’ as she quickly became known, was different. She was smart. She couldn’t have been less interested in the skinny boys on news or any of the grizzly bears on the back bench. Her boyfriends were always incredibly tall mega-Sloanes she’d known since she was six, who thought journalists were dismal little people. Yet there was a steely glint in her sleepy brown eyes, a hard edge to her long blonde hair and a no-nonsense air about her flower-patterned mini dresses.

      The editor had finally met her match.

      Connie was my best – and, sometimes, only – friend at the Standard. I would often poke my head into the editor’s office, where she sat drinking pot after pot of fresh ginger tea that was so strong that when you drank it, it felt like your whole face was on fire. She would shriek, quietly: ‘ESTHER!! Oh my God I’ve just eaten an entire Bounty and TWO packets of Maltesers!!!’

      I have been thinking about Connie recently because I came across a mention of a mango salsa, which she used to make for me in the weeny galley kitchen of her top floor flat in Notting Hill. Roasting hot in summer and freezing cold in winter (‘I think another bad January might finish me off’), Connie’s flat was a miracle of survival, like those plants you get in the desert, or 100,000 miles under the sea.

      Anyway she almost always has the ingredients in her kitchen for this spicy mango salsa, and it’s quite, quite delicious. I realize the above whimsy makes it sound like Connie is now dead, but she isn’t. She’s still there, in that same deathtrap flat, training to be a shrink.

      My husband and I had this with a very rich jerk pork belly, which didn’t work at all; it was too rich and gacky and yuk. It would be very good instead with some plain steak, or a tuna steak (although these days one cannot really eat such things) or a plain white fish like turbot or pollock.

      Connie’s Mango Salsa

      Makes enough for 2–3

       1 mango – diced

       juice of 1 lime

       small handful fresh coriander

       a sprinkling of fresh mint

       1 chilli – chopped finely, seeds removed

       1 avocado, diced

       salt

      1 Put everything in a bowl and mix.

      Osso Buco

      The best thing about working at the Evening Standard, where I was from 2005 to 2007 (although for fuck’s sake don’t tell the Student Loans Company that – as far as they’re concerned I was missing presumed dead in western Namibia and therefore do NOT owe them any money for that tax year), was my boss.

      He was so great because he’d always say ‘well done’. It didn’t really matter what you’d done; he’d always just say ‘well done’. I mean, not if you’d done something bad. If you’d done something bad he’d say ‘oh dear’. And then when you put it right, he’d say ‘well done’.

      This worked on me. Although I’d had nice bosses in the past, none of them had said ‘well done’ with the frequency and fervour of Sebastian.

      ‘Seb I got you a sandwich,’ I’d say.

      ‘Oh well done,’ he’d say.

      ‘Seb I rang Antonia Fraser about that thing,’ I’d say.

      ‘Oh, well done. What did she say?’ he’d say.

      [She almost always said ‘fuck off’, or something like that, by the way.]

      ‘Seb I forgot to put through all those payments,’ I’d say.

      ‘Oh dear,’ he’d say. ‘Can you do it now?’

      ‘Yes I’ll do it now,’ I’d say.

      ‘Oh, well done,’ he’d say.

      You get the picture. On Friday lunchtimes, I used to get us both chicken shawarmas from Ranoush Juice, just opposite the Evening Standard’s offices in Kensington. Ranoush Juice is one of a chain of Lebanese places that will be familiar to Londoners, and not to anyone else. We’d eat the sandwiches at our desks, stinking the place out. On Fridays at the Standard there was nothing to do after about 1pm because there

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