Tonight’s entry may well be both short and in two bits.
I am sitting in the afternoon sunshine writing this very early, because this evening we are going to see some old friends, and I am concerned lest I become too intoxicated to write to you later.
Stranger things have happened.
The visit to the old friends has already occupied most of the day, although we have not got within fifty miles of their house yet.
The thing is that they are a modern thing called vegans, which means that not only do they not eat meat, but they do not eat eggs or anything made out of milk either. This has been around for years and years, but it is only very recently that it has been properly possible to be one, because we have only just lately invented nice things to eat that are not meat.
They have invited us for dinner, and in a rush of excitement, we volunteered to make a pudding.
This, we thought, would be the easy part of the dinner, because there is no meat in a pudding. Number One Daughter and I both do baking, and she is very good at it. Between the two of us it should be an absolute doddle.
How wrong we were.
We thought we would make a cheesecake.
The first part of the name is the giveaway. We had got to make a cheesecake without either cheese, or cream, or any of the things that go into cake, like butter or eggs.
We looked on the mighty Internet, and realised that we had not got a single thing that could be used in a cheesecake instead of all of the usual nice things. We read half a dozen recipes, calling for things like rose water or coconut butter, which Mark said sounded like hand cream.
In the end we found one which seemed to be mostly strawberries and a sort of vegetarian chocolate.
We had never heard of almost everything else in the recipe, but we knew that strawberries and chocolate were nice.
We went to Sainsbury’s, where we wandered round for ages, wondering where one might find a substance called agar agar, and other similar mysteries. In the end a nice lady helpfully gave me directions, and by the time we got back to the car park we had spent a fortune and had a trolley full of odd things, all of which came in the sort of wrapping which has loopy writing and beige pictures of leaves that look as though they have been printed by a six year old with a potato. This is to make you think that it is simple and good for you, even though it is probably a composite of all sorts of peculiar rubbish.
When we came back we had to cook it.
This was very messy.
Liquidised strawberries and cacao powder were everywhere.
Mark and Number One Son-In-Law wandered in and out, making helpful comments and eating things, until they were persuaded to wash up.
There was a lot of washing up
We sieved it and poured it and boiled the jelly, and poured it into a tin to set, which it didn’t.
Number One Daughter said rude things about vegan ingredients.
We boiled some more vegan gelatine and whipped it up again.
It still didn’t set.
We put it in the freezer.
It didn’t freeze either.
In the end we put all the rest of the strawberries in a dish and the cheesecake in a jug and thought we would pretend it was strawberry sauce.
I will keep you posted.
LATER NOTE: It turned out, rather fortunately, that our friends were entirely unsurprised by the lack of solidity in the cheesecake.
This was because they have been doing vegan cooking for ages, and already know that it is ridiculously difficult. They laughed a lot and made politely admiring noises, and everybody ate all of it, even the bit that would have been the base, and everything turned out just fine.
They, on the other hand, being practised at cooking with hardly any useful ingredients at all, produced a superb spaghetti dish, followed, later, by some intensely rich crumble.
I was jolly impressed.
It was a brilliant evening.
We squished ten of us into a tiny flat, and ate, and drank, and all talked over one another in our eagerness for being together. My friend has been my friend for very nearly thirty years now, and I have not seen him since Oliver was a baby. In fact I was so pleased to see him that I could have burst into tears. Obviously I did not do this, because of it being an entirely embarrassing way to carry on, and I am, after all, British.
His wife is tiny, and gentle, and so thoughtfully kind that she made me feel as if I am a robust rascally sort of person who ought to consider ways in which I could be less rude and unsympathetic in my life.
Even his mother came to join us. We had come to know her many years ago, when she was hospitable and friendly to us when we were rootless vagabonds with no certain future, and it was ace to see her again.
We played a board game which was a sort of indoor pool, where you had to flick counters into holes. This made everybody yell with excitement, at least until Oliver won, and we had such a happy evening that even the children did not want it to end, but of course it did.
We are back in our camper van now, and it feels very quiet. I feel quiet inside after such a wonderfully cheerful evening.
It is almost three o’clock.
I think I had better go to sleep.
The picture is of the board game. The floury stuff is to make the counters slide more easily. I do not know if it is really flour.
