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Sorrel
9 May 2003
E-mail may have changed my life, in so far as I am much more in touch with far more people than ever I used to keep, never having been good at the letter-writing or the telephoning, but it also causes me deep anxiety half a dozen times a day, that interval between asking the machine to fetch it and its actual arrival. Things can go wrong; messages can be lost; I can actually sit here and watch my mail disappear into the maw of undifferentiated white noise. As this afternoon, when my mail client was afflicted with a mild distemper, and contrived to collect nothing from the server, while at the same time ensuring that all mail on the server was deleted. Every time I check my mail, I worry that this will happen; once in a blue moon, it does. And I have no way of knowing what's been lost, only that something certainly has. If you sent me a message this afternoon, send it again...
To make myself feel better, this evening I went into the back yard and harvested; and so cooked fillet of pork with a mustard mash, French beans and a cream and sorrel sauce. If ever I actually go the allotment route, then potatoes and beans too can be home-grown; today it was just the sorrel. Seriously scrummy, though. Fry the pork, deglaze the pan with a splash of white wine (I used an organic Spanish, made from the Airen grape), chuck in a handful of sorrel and sizzle for long enough to season with salt and pepper, then add single cream until gorgeous. The sorrel almost dissolves, but the lemony richness of it lingers. Alas, that was my sorrel harvest; I'm waiting for a potload of seeds to germinate, but I seem to have been waiting for a while.
© Chaz Brenchley 2003
Reproduced here by permission of Chaz Brenchley, who asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work.