Farm Food: Chicken Pot Pie
Making the table look pretty is almost as fun and satisfying for me as the cooking.
It’s hard to argue that there is any meal more quintessentially English than Sunday lunch at home. Many of our friends and family members make it a weekly practice – either going for lunch at a friends house or hosting their own. As much as Christopher and I enjoy these meals, we often feel that we need Sundays to be more focused on down time – finding ourselves in the garden, on a horse, or gorging ourselves at the buffet at Soho Farmhouse instead of hosting a house full of people. With Zach at school 6 days a week, it’s the only day we have him to ourselves and we all like to sleep late and go where the day naturally takes us.
That said, from time to time, I do get inspired to cook Sunday lunch. And when I do, I like to enjoy the results of my labour with friends and family just like the English do. ..
In January we give the garden a haircut. We cut back everything that has continued to be green until around Christmas time, we prune, we rake dead lives, and we pick out random rocks and twigs that have collected in the beds. It’s a very satisfying chore, in that the garden looks so organised and ordered when we are done, and it helps me get over the winter blues when there is very little alive apart from the Hellebore (which are much more noticeable when everything else has been tidied). This winter, I couldn’t believe how much was still alive or already blossoming in late December – we were mowing our lawn until just before Christmas! – so I spent a morning with my camera documenting the late-in-the-year-garden-beauty for posterity.