Pasta with prawns, peppers, and pesto sauce

Mum started today with one of her “my head hurts” loops – “I don’t know what to do, it’s never been this bad before, can’t you do something about it?” – repeated roughly every 30 seconds. Eventually the headache eased enough that her toothache – that has been ‘constant’ despite her not mentioning it for several days – became the main topic of the loop.

Suki was in ‘pest’ mode: I gave her breakfast, she inhaled it like she had a vacuum cleaner as a recent ancestor, then paced and hissed and yelled for more. Around lunchtime, I gave in and gave her some food. She ate maybe three mouthfuls, and then retreated under her cupboard for a kip.

Meanwhile, my immune system announced that spring is here by declaring a red alert on plane tree pollen. Sniff.

So this afternoon I went gardening. Four of the new potatoes I bought from the supermarket a few weeks ago had started shooting (🔫🔫), so I decided to (hopefully) turn four potatoes into lots more potatoes. They’re now in pots outside, and as soon as they’re something more than plastic pots of compost I’ll share some photos.

Inspired, I went online shopping and bought (deep breath):

• Tomato seeds (a pack of 14 different heritage varieties);
• Rainbow carrot seeds;
• Radish seeds;
• Stripy purple aubergine seeds;
• Mini courgette plant seeds;
• Purple pak choi seeds;
• Mini multicolour pepper seeds;
• Mixed flower seeds;
• Mini sunflower seeds;
• Love-in-a-mist seeds (they were only about £1 a packet and grow very well in our front garden);
• A ‘special offer’ of 32 assorted flower plug plants for £4.99;
• Little coir seed pots;
• Big fabric bags for growing the veg plants in (lighter and easier to move than plastic pots);
• More compost.

Clearly two people, one a fussy eater, aren’t going to be able to eat all that veg, so my plan is to grow maybe a third to a half, leaving the rest until next year, and sell off the surplus through the local online marketplace and/or through donating them to charity shops. (One of the ones down in the village often sells tomato plants donated by local gardeners, so I can’t imagine they’ll turn their noses up at peppers, courgettes, or aubergines.)

The gardening project, while a little over-done in my usual ‘I may have got a bit carried away” style, is an investment in a brighter future, at a time when I feel very overwhelmed and irritable and lacking in hope. Mum will doubtless complain about me buying too much, but a nice freshly-pulled carrot or radish might change her tune, at least temporarily.

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For dinner this evening I made a pasta dish that will be in the cookery book that I really will finish and publish soon: pasta (any shape) with raw prawns fried in a splash of the oil from a jar of chargrilled peppers, then the peppers added. Drain the pasta, saving a small amount of the water, and stir it and a generous tablespoon of pesto into the prawns and peppers. Add the pasta water in to make a sauce, then season with black pepper.

Serve while it’s still steaming hot. It’s delicious – sweet and savoury and herbal, with a sauce that’s creamy without any cream. To my surprise, mum ate her portion without comment: no praise, but no complaints either. That’s a win, I guess?

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Tomorrow we’re going out for mum to have a blood test. She’s looping with anxiety (“do I need my bag? What about my key? So am I just staying here? Oh, OK. Will I need my bag?”), and nothing I say will reassure or distract her. It’s going to be a long, long evening, and I don’t dare take solace in ice cream as that may push my gallbladder – currently reacting surprisingly well to the fat in the peppers and the pesto – too far.

I’ll try to just think of freshly-grown peppers and tomatoes and carrots. And flowers, although most of those won’t taste terribly nice as I’m not a snail. 🐌