Five years ago, in an attempt to flee the looming London lockdown, my husband, two boys and I, departed our Chelsea Flat for a sheep ranch on the south coast of England. Not knowing how long we would be gone, we initially took very little with us. A bag of clothing each, computers so we could work and do school remotely and my brand new copy of SIMPLE by Yotam Ottolenghi, which I had just received on my 40th birthday. We are not British and our expat experience had only begun two years prior. Trying to piece that experience together is akin to describing a vivid dream a couple days after it occurred. It’s all there, in full color, but the transition to words is near impossible. Those two years represent a season of my life that doesn’t fit neatly into the greater puzzle. I grew up in a mountain town in Colorado, my body and mind created for high altitude adventures, Birkenstocks and Carhartts (before Carhartt was the ‘in’ brand). The greater part of my adult life had consisted of working as an inner city Paramedic in Denver while raising my two high energy boys. Life was dirty, messy and regularly marked with outdoor adventures.
Then I was an expat wife, living in Chelsea, London. I agreed to the experience, I craved the experience, I couldn’t wait for the experience. It would be pertinent to point out that I also had zero idea what it meant to live in Chelsea, with children attending a British Private School. We jumped into this opportunity without having been consumers of British culture. We didn’t know which restaurants were hip or which neighborhoods were for the social elite. As I type this out, I actually cannot recall how we chose our neighborhood or the boy’s school.
During one of my first ladies’ night’s out, I was given some great advice by a more veteran expat wife. Always carry cash to group meals and when someone starts to order Magnums of champagne (or really anything extravagant), offer to pay your portion in cash and head on home! This tip was critical in my enjoyment of the following two years, because I was soon to find out that expat life, in Chelsea, revolved around ladies lunches & large group dinners – almost always at hip restaurants, social functions, and the exchange of the ‘not to miss’ travel destinations in Europe and beyond. I spent much of that time feeling as though I was playing dress up in an imaginary world, but my imagination didn’t even have the building blocks to have created it. It was outrageously fun, totally extravagant and so far from my comfort zone that it still feels like a dream I’m trying to recall.
Food was one of my greatest takeaways from our time in London. Every meal out inspired me to recreate the flavors at home. The weekly farmer’s markets offered up vegetables so fresh and vibrantly colored that it was impossible to leave without them. Pop up food markets offered endless opportunities to try foods we never knew existed and food combinations we hadn’t dreamed of. Cookbooks had a simpler vibe than I had seen in the states. They used weights in place of volume, coriander instead of cilantro, beet root instead of beets, and aubergine instead of eggplant. I felt as though I was learning a new language, but one I could master quickly and alone in my kitchen. The atmosphere in cafes changed the way we chose to experience food. Our busy lives in the U.S. had dictated food on the go, but somehow our busy lives in London left time to eat ‘quick food’ from real plates during the day or on the way home from school. The overall appreciation for food and it’s role in sustaining us, physically and mentally, was solidified during our expat experience.
The two months we spent at that sheep farm sealed my fate as a passionate explorer of flavor. Like the rest of the world, we spent hours each morning trying to decipher what the pandemic had in store for us. We dispensed with our anxiety by hiking through the countryside, learning to bake sourdough, line drying our laundry and using our quaint kitchen and it’s limited equipment to create comforting meals. I cooked my way through SIMPLE and worked to recreate my favorite dishes from restaurants around London, using the ingredients my husband would bring home from the store. The combination of pandemic scarcity, a small town grocery store, and my husband’s lack of experience as the procurer of groceries meant that the list I sent with him, rarely translated to the actual items arriving in our kitchen. Substitutions were frequently required and were rarely those an experienced home cook might expect. You may wonder why he became our family shopper during this time, complicating an already challenging experience. We had both began the process of obtaining our British driver’s licenses a few months prior and my test was cancelled due to the pandemic just after he had passed his. This will forever give him bragging rights as I will never know if I would have passed on my first attempt, a rare occurrence for American expats in England. Sigh.
My bragging rights remain in my ability to feed my family nutritionally dense and generally great tasting food regardless of what groceries come through the door or can be found in our fridge and pantry. This essay was inspired by two completely separate occurrences this past week. The first was a Facebook memory of our first couple days at the sheep ranch and the second was the broccoli that arrived in my weekly vegetable delivery. If you’ve ever tried The House Green Salad (now named the Chilli Broccoli Salad) at Dishoom (a London based Indian restaurant with multiple locations), I would be surprised. Honestly, I was slightly shocked to find it still on the menu when I sat down to write this and even more shocked to find that they offer the recipe which I can’t bring myself to look at since I’ve worked so hard to create my own version! This raw broccoli salad is bright, crisp and full of flavors that my culturally ignorant self would not attribute to Indian culture and I would never think to pair with broccoli. I made a version of this salad for the first time during our sheep farm life and I have made it various times over the past 5 years. This version, that I’m including here, will probably not be it’s final iteration, but I felt it was time to share it and the incredible memories that it invoked. I hope you try it, love it and adapt it until it becomes your own.