… and I don’t mean Declan Rice, of Arsenal and England. I don’t forget him because I have a football sticker of him on my phone case. No, I mean risotto rice.
My longest-serving friend and I are on our annual camping trip and we forgot the essential ingredient in our much-loved camping dish. It felt like a stumble when we realised this yesterday, deep in our camping valley, not a risotto rice shop in sight for miles.
The thing is, as we’re already discovering, we’re both adaptable and lenient. So we’ve leaned into pasta. And adapted to salads: partially home-grown, laden with avocado slices. And we’ve swerved into new potatoes dug from my allotment. And ginger biscuits half coated in dark chocolate - well, some things are never forgotten.
We’ve also not forgotten swallow flights over the pond, grasshopper and chiffchaff soundtracks, flashes of a kingfisher, cool grass underfoot, sunscreen and insect repellent. We’ve remembered our journals, pens, paints, books, and this year, my new hammock.
One year (the Norfolk year) I forgot to bring the Trangia stove. We thought about buying a stove for about five minutes before reckoning we could cook in the Jetboil water boiler. Fortunately, that time we’d remembered the rice since risotto is one of the few from-scratch dishes it’s possible to cook in a Jetboil. You heard that first here.
I wonder if Declan Rice likes risotto, and whether this explains his agility on a football pitch. It maybe that forgetting risotto explains this.
As for my longest-serving friend and me, we’re, risotto or not, doing what we always do when camping. Relaxing into remembering who we are and what grounds us into growth.
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