Strawberry pannacotta with balsamic
Spaghetti with lemon and parmesan cheese
Oven-baked perch with potatoes, olives and mandarin olive oil
Antipasti: Meat, cheese and bruschetta
Spaghetti with anchovies, olives and capers
Secondo piatto: Breaded veal cutlets
Contorno: Potatoes roasted with garlic and rosemary
16 Waking up from the Italian dream
Spiralini with ricotta and tomatoes
Spaghetti for hungry footballers
18 The outside world pays a visit
We’d both been working in TV for a long time, ten years for me, seven years for Jason. I think that ten years is long enough to do anything. I’ve always admired old people who can look back at their lives and divvy it up into the different chapters, much more than those who have just doggedly pursued one thing. We felt we’d done telly for long enough and we’d started making plans, or at least flirting with the possibility of plans, for doing something else, something completely different.
We’d been living in LA for three years, having moved there to set up a US office of RDF Media, the company we both worked for, making programmes like Faking It, Scrapheap Challenge and Wifeswap. We lived in the hills under the Hollywood sign, bought coffee from a drive-through on our way to work, went surfing at the weekend or visiting the silver Airstream trailer I’d impulsively bought one day up in the mountains by the Kern River. We bought fashionable clothes, hung out in the kind of bars where you could get your nails done while sipping your martini and having your car valet-parked. Generally we led a pretty charmed, if rather shallow, life.
‘New life’, as we began to refer to it, had a lot to live up to. Lots of people who make big life changes are escaping something—a job they hate, a country they have come to loathe, a future that just seems too banal and laid out. It wasn’t at all like that for us. We both had really good jobs in television, we worked with people we really liked, we were stimulated and we were very well rewarded for our efforts. We’d also enjoyed a bit of public acknowledgement of our efforts because we’d both been in front of the camera as well as behind it—me co-presenting Scrapheap Challenge with Robert Llewellyn, and Jason being one of the presenters in a series called Wreck Detectives, which investigated the stories of shipwrecks. We also had enough creative rein to mean that our ideas stood a chance of ‘making it’ to the screen.
But TV was becoming less wholesome. I didn’t really want to be making shows like Big Brother or X Factor or I’m a Celebrity or a hundred other programmes that take people and then use them, all for our viewing pleasure. I didn’t want constantly to be justifying my latest series with an ever smaller fig leaf of excuses for this exploitation that the programme was ‘revealing’ or ‘helped people understand the world’. And neither did I want to stay and get jaded. We wanted to quit while we were ahead.
But what to do instead? Jason had clearer ideas from the start. He wanted to do something that involved some physical work and to make something which at the end he could hold up with pride and say ‘This is the product of my labours and it is good.’
That still left the field pretty open.
We both really liked food and, since the start of our relationship, food and cooking and eating together had been a pretty key element. In fact, from when we first met, Jason was always rummaging around for scraps of paper to jot down some recipe he’d just made, or to write down the pearls of wisdom from a restaurant chef who’d just revealed some cooking secret. In fact, it became a joke that my job was to be constantly buying pretty notebooks to paste in all these scraps of paper, saying there was no point having all these ideas if you could never find them again.
We talked about running a restaurant but everyone we know who does it says, ‘Don’t don’t don’t.’ It’s such a commitment of time and single-mindedness—you don’t have the flexibility to do a bit of this and a bit of that, you have to stick with it totally without deviation, every day, every hour. It’s a life equivalent of an each-mouthful-the-same plate of risotto rather than the mixed meze we were after.
One day we were in the Grove shopping centre in Hollywood. A place that by all accounts should be horrific and terrifying because it is such a model of super-clean, super-straight, super-capitalist, super-nice America, but which for some reason doesn’t quite make you choke in the way that it should. Well, at least there was a shop there we really liked, called O&Co. It’s part of that French chain L’Occitane which does stinky unguents to slather yourself in—but O&Co is the food bit that does mainly olive oil and also a few other things like vinegars and mustards. In the one in the should-be-scary Grove, they had lots of different olive oils that you could taste. We’d