So the boyfriend wins. We have fought and debated.Him pulling his hair out trying to understand why I choose not to write a cook book. Our customers have since long tired of asking if and when a recipe book will become available. "Sometime in the near future" was always my hazy reply. If the truth be told , the reason I haven,t done so in the past can be attributed to ill discipline. In all the years that I have cooked for this street trading business,and weddings and huge parties and festivals and ran my own restaurant, I have never measured anything. All the ingredients that I have used in my recipes and the quantities are neither measured nor written down. I suppose this attitude stems from coming from a large family and a culture where you never really know how many people you are cooking for but must ensure that food is available should a guest arrive. Woe betide you if it be known that an unexpected guest arrived your home and left on an empty stomach!"How can I write a recipe book without first determining what quantities of ingredients the readers will need"? I,d fired back at the boyfriend who,d been on my case from the moment we met.Lately I,d taken to telling him he was putting undue pressure on me.A case of the best defence being attack and attack even if unfairly. So let me be fair. Without my miserable Angel, I would still be struggling to understand why and how the goldmine that was Camden lock market came to disappear before my very eyes and my nostalgia clinging thoughts would still be holding me prisoner in that now desperately conditioned market. I would still be trading there stooped and draped in clothes best suited for the North pole in the winter and praying for the summer to last long enough to recoup all the losses we had incurred during the cold weather.Camden had become an albatross but I refused to acknowledge it. I summoned the courage to leave after many months subsidizing its existence with takings from Greenwich market only because the boyfriend forced me to do the unpalatable maths."Wake up and smell the coffee" he continuously nagged. The heartache and high blood pressure inducing stress that I have suffered from being removed from first, Greenwich Market,then Shephereds markets (more on all these removals in later blogs) and lately UCL has meant that the the boyfriend has taken the brunt of my misplaced anger but he has also been a constant reminder of the futility of trading at individual run markets.According to him,I should only now trade at my own self organized markets or festivals. I finally agreed to start writing my recipes down and to work out what quantities after I received a letter from Her majesty,s court services,advising that a charlatan market organiser I am suing for a return of the exorbitant fees my company paid to attend an event he fraudulently misrepresented is contesting my claim. Such is the nature of London street trading now that a new age market organiser can call a lunch time market a festival and refuse to return the fees paid by traders even when it is so obvious that he was pulling a fast one and blatantly ripping traders off .On the same day, I receive an email advising that It had not been possible to refund a payment I made to cater at the cancelled Ring Master festival at Hopton Court. The life lesson here is always to pay for purchases especially those of not immediate consumption with credit and not debit card.My bank assures me it will try to get me a refund from paypal if the event organizer won,t cough up.
You might wonder dear reader why if I have such wonderful recipes and street trading is such a fuss, do I not open a restaurant?. Thing is, been there, done that. Would not now touch it with a barge poll. Then, I was younger and had only a teenage daughter to mummy but yet the stress of running it made my hair fall out in clumps . Currently, as you are aware, I have 2 blessed toddlers who demand all of my sleep deprived attention. Therefore, I must cook and perhaps write but with a flexibility that curls around their routine.
So, no rest for the wicked then. I must not only keep trading at markets this winter, I will also be diligently working on my first recipe book. Now if only I can find that measuring jug!
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