It had been a pleasant interlude in the armchair. I had finished cobbling together half a dozen small t-shirts to use as samples for an upcoming course that I am creating because my friend Marion who runs Beautiful Silks had asked me if I had any ideas I could share about transforming t-shirts into dresses and it is much easier to work on a table-top with maquettes than to kneel on a hard wooden floor trying not to obscure the camera lens with my bottom as I am attempting to explain what I am doing. I drifted from the armchair into the kitchen with a view to distilling order from chaos when I stumbled across a quantity of doubly desiccated legumes resting on a piece of kitchen paper, left over from a blind baking a few days before. I poured them into a bowl and doused them in boiling water while I considered their future.
My mother used to make a dish she called ‘Boston Baked Beans’, a mild concoction of red beans, tomatoes, onions and a few chopped carrots tempered with a spoonful of molasses and then cooked in the oven for a few hours, and though I have expanded on it in the years since I first left home, adding garlic, chilis, olive oil-fried red capsicums and whichever spices were too slow to scuttle out of my reach in the pantry, the idea of cooking beans brings my Ma right back into the kitchen where after tasting my version (or frankly whatever else I was cooking) she would inevitably pronounce
“it’s quite good but there’s something missing that I can’t quite place my finger on, I’ll tell you what it is when it comes to me”
I never imagined I would miss her saying that, but I do.