Rolling Up

23rd April 2011 Easter Saturday

Saturday morning, my husband makes sushi for the starter. He’s an expert in rolling up fat tubes of sticky rice, studded with asparagus and avocado, smoked salmon and red peppers, layered with pickled ginger, pink as skin, and nose-snorting hot wasabi paste. All wrapped up in rectangles of dark green seaweed parchment.

Filling the fridge with white wine, a bottle slips from his fingers - a crunchy green glass lake creeps across the kitchen floor. He’s more upset than I am - thinks it’s his brain making him clumsy. I think it’s a warning to stop drinking so much. I mop it up with paper towels and spray with Ecover cleaner - I don’t want the kitchen to smell like a winery.

I slather my hazelnut meringue - very sticky in the middle - with a layer of chocolate cream and roll it up into a huge fat log, drizzling the outside with more chocolate and fluttering the plate with cape gooseberries in their veined paper wings. I worry that I need more cream and ring my sister to bring some when they come.

Suddenly the house is full of big, tall, beautiful young people - my beloved nephews and nieces and their partners - brimming with laughter and life and more - my niece-in-law now eight months pregnant. They spill into the sunny, windy garden with plates of noodles and Thai fish curry. For once I haven’t cooked enough and even though we are all family - some of us play the game of FHB (family hold back) and eat mostly noodles.

Before the pudding we play the squatting game on the grass which I didn’t cut - all speckled with daisies and the last of the apple blossom. Not really a game - more of a contest - who can sit on their haunches without toppling over? Like me and my sisters and brother who spent many hours of our childhood squatting in the African dirt, playing close to the earth. Mostly it’s easy to tip the men over with their long legs and narrow hips while the women stay solid, unswayed, heavy dropped to the ground.

I’m still fretting about cream for the hazelnut roulade but my nephew comes to the rescue and whizzes up a deep ruby red coulis from last year’s raspberries, plums, blueberries and strawberries in the freezer. And we even have room for the creme brulee as well. So no need for FHB this time.