Spreads

by Caroline

Although Lisa’s and my focus here is primarily on the food we cook and eat with our families, every once in a while I, at least, cook something I know no one else will like. Sometimes, I don’t even much care. A recipe strikes me because it has one of those appealing words (mmm, caramelized) or usefully uses up lots of produce, or just has a pretty picture accompanying it.

Sometimes, I simply need to be in the kitchen cooking, and the result is really far less important than the process. So it was Saturday morning. A writing project was preoccupying me, but I wasn’t ready to sit at the computer yet and tackle it. I needed to busy myself with something slow and methodical, something that would give me some time to think. It was too rainy to go out for a run — my usual habit when I’m mulling over an essay — and I could have baked bread or chopped vegetables to start a pot of soup (like I did just this time last year) but this recipe for grapefruit ginger curd had just arrived in my inbox. And so, perhaps weirdly, I made curd. I even did the tedious step of grating a knob of ginger and pressing the grated pulp through a strainer to produce fresh ginger juice — that’s the kind of distraction I needed. It’s worth it, really. It’s delicious. And the ten minutes at the stove stirring it were just enough to get me back to my writing, now with a piece of fresh toast spread with this sunny, citrusy curd on top.