Three Caballeros

MUSSEL, CAULIFLOWER, SPINACH CURRY £8.50
This is Nathan Outlaws’ coveted, staff lunch, dish of choice. We’re making the delicious curry sauce, wilting the spinach and providing fresh mussels and blanched cauliflower for you to throw in at the last minute. Utterly scrummy.

PRAWN MOILEE £9.50
We’re cooking this dish this week to replenish our frozen stock, it’s our best seller, so we thought we would offer it up as a fresh Friday take away before committing it to the freezer. Both the sides will work well with this dish as well. From the fabulous book ‘Dishoom - From Bombay with Love’ which came out last year. It’s a light, fragrant and utterly delicious South-Indian style curry, packed with juicy prawns and tempered with coconut milk. I love the sub title to the book, ‘Cookery Book and Highly Subjective Guide to Bombay with Map’

LEMON RICE £3.50
I have a soft spot for this recipe as it was handwritten by Ravinder Bhogal when she came to cook at a pop up a few years ago. It includes asafoetida, lemon, turmeric, chilli, mustard seed and fresh curry leaves. It positively struts onto the plate, holding its own alongside a Prawn Moilee, Chicken Ruby or a charcoal smoked aubergine curry for that matter.

GREEN BEAN, MUSTARD SEED, GINGER £4.00
We’re spicing up the greens a bit here, adding a little intrigue and interest. They go well with both the Mussels & the Prawn Moilee and I love the slightly seedy crunch and ginger heat.

CHOCOLATE ORANGE TART, CRÈME FRAICHE - £6.00
I know we’re kicking off bit early for Easter, marketing is not my middle name, but I’m all over this classic combination of bitter chocolate and orange and just because it’s the middle of March, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be tucking into it.

Robbie Worral peered across Ince marsh in 1963. We were three, and although we didn’t know it then, three caballeros, Robbie, my twin brother Kenneth and I. We stood on Greenbank, just by the vicarage one hot Saturday, sticky with the heat and frustrated with the day. The heat haze hovered over the ‘Big Wood’ and through the Fens. It was July, before the harvest, school was out, it was after lunch and we had done most of what we had to do for the day.

We were nine years old, days when the earth is flat and the future stretches only as far as the eye can see. Days are always sunny and the scent of cows in the meadow and the sound of tractors plying their way across the marshes are a continual frustration to three, daredevil caballeros.

Robbie Worral was nine years old and he gazed across Ince marsh and said; ‘Let’s go…… He gazed and wondered, sighed, slowly reflected and finally spat out ….far’ In all my writing since, I have never been able to recreate the poetry, simplicity, romance and idiocy of that statement. The words, those three simple words ‘Let’s go far’ did not originate in his mind, his lungs, his bowels or his toes. They did not originate in the earth below him or the earth below that. They came from the creation of time and space and at that moment, on that dry, frustrating day, they shoved into me the idea that somehow it was possible, to go far.

About that time, maybe a few years earlier, Kenneth and I shared a bedroom, we always did. I remember bunk beds, he on the top, I on the bottom. At night, well at bedtime, which in those days seemed to be late afternoon, we never slept, there was no point, we were wide awake. We told each other stories, always involving great gallantry, heroes, heroism and always chargers. His horse was always white, mine black.

The top bunk and a white horse was always my dream, but he was a better fighter than I. So I countered with a black horse, which was the antichrist and I knew it was better, because it was stronger, and if anyone came too close they would be devoured by my horse, as if being swallowed up by a black hole. Of course this was all bollocks, I just wanted the white horse, I could have even lived without the top bunk for a while.

So one of us would start a tale along the selfish lines of me or my and mine and what I did or didn’t do. And when that one of us was exhausted by our daring, the other would pick up the tale, change the white horse for black, or vice versa. Change the setting from the altiplano to the bottom bunk, or the nether world of mystery and imagination and continue the remarkably single minded quest of setting the world to right, rescuing damsels and straying parents from distress, bringing riches to the poor and riding into the sunset.

Anyway, on one of those endless days, before Robbie Worral issued that statement from the beginning of time, Kenneth and I went on a journey across the known and partially unknown world. I remember, we started at the bottom of our steps.

I say ‘our’ steps, because in that tiny spec of a village, Marsh lane, Monastery Row, The North Hills, Ince Square, Greenbank, everything was ours. Because we seemed to belong to everything and everybody. It was our house. Our steps, our Shelley, our Kenneth, our road and our village. This was our world and hugely secret to my brother and I. We drew maps of the boundaries and gave every part a name. Detailed maps of every crop of raspberries and the way through them, avoiding the nettles. And the tunnels and dens and tree dens we used to build to entertain kings.
We started at the bottom of our steps, turned right down Greenbank, along the sandstone wall to the vicarage. The turned left, across the road and over the gate into Eardley’s field, then across the field and down to the marshes.

Eardley’s field was large and full of long, sweet smelling grass and stretched, as if to the end of the county. We discovered dips and mounds, bogs, nettles and clusters of cow pats barring our way. Somewhere near the middle, a dip and a long bank hidden by grasses, we ventured through and headed East, towards the canal. We crawled through fences, ribbons of barbed wire posted at intervals and into a field the size of Cheshire, Cranks field.

From there we crossed an immense plain and on, through a hedge at the far side, into a smaller field beside the Fens wood. Just through the bushes, we saw two horses beckoning. Stiff proud and majestic, with wide nostrils flaring, chill in the stiff hot sun. Eyes gawping, we inched towards them, one white, one black, in the hot grass beyond the bushes. And there, a continent away from our house, we mounted our night time steeds, the white one taller than the black, and rode and rode back into our dreams.

Of course they were only tree trunks, felled many years earlier and embedded into the earth. But for many years afterwards, we visited our horses, well at least until the end of that summer and we rode and rode and rode far.

Here’s next week’s menu. I have to say I was very impressed by the number of people who bought into the grilled lamb’s heart salad this week, I really hope you enjoyed it and would love to get your thoughts.