Book club

I love my book club. I was late to the book club party – I think moving around a lot when the kids were under 10 didn’t really help establish any particularly routines. But I was invited to join a local book club around 5 years ago and I felt really honoured. It was as if I had graduated to some higher level of intelligentsia (had to look up that spelling…), and was now part of a group of like-minded women, struggling with being mothers and working, and juggling everything else, but able to sit down once every few weeks having read an interesting book and discuss it at length. I was nervous ahead of the first meeting, although I knew that another “newbie” was joining at the same time which meant I wasn’t the only one suffering apprehension. The book we had been asked to read ahead of the meeting was not something I would have picked off the shelf, and the blurb seemed quite good. Having had no guidance on what actually happened at the book club, I made notes as I read the book, thought about the style of it, the context, what the author was trying to say – if there was any deeper meaning. It was a strange book about somewhere in Birmingham where this guy kept dogs in his house but never cleaned up after them. So I was a little bewildered on the choice and hoped that I didn’t have to give a detailed critique as an initiation test. At the meeting, there was a lot of pre-chat about how everyone was and it was lovely, very relaxing. Then we got to talk about the book. Luckily, the book “chooser” explained how she had struggled with the book and almost phoned us up to explain that it wasn’t a great book to start off our book club experience…with everyone else agreeing that it was a very strange book. I realised then that my nervousness about not being “learned” enough was unnecessary and that it was more about the getting together than the actual book. I still tried to talk about the style of the language and how the descriptive passages were so vivid I could smell the guy’s dirty dogs, and nobody thought I was talking out of turn, I think….

So five years (or so) later, the book club is still going. We take it in turns to choose the book and it’s my turn to choose the next read. It’s a double-edge sword for me. I love looking at books, reading books, wandering around book shops. But when it comes to actually choosing a book for my book club, I seem to lose all sense of reality. I scour the internet for “10 best books of 2015”; “10 classic books you must read”; “Top 50 best ever books”; you name it, I search for it. I then buy about five books. When they arrive, I look at them, read the first few pages, and then decide to go back online and have another look. I think maybe I could offer up a book that I really enjoyed and would like to read again (given that age is playing havoc with my memory) but then I worry that’s cheating. My choices in the past have met with mixed success (Memory of Love/The Paris Wife/The Tent, The Bucket and Me/Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal/Stoner). This time around I am tempted by one of the Man Booker shortlists but then the new range of Penguin classics look really interesting but would everyone groan if I revealed the next read was Albert Camus’ The Outsider? Would I really want to read that if I had all the books in the world at my feet? I love it when people recommend books to me – books that have stayed with them (if anyone is reading this, then send me some ideas…) And yes, I need to hold the book in my hands and not read it on a screen….

So, having tested the water on an idea with some of my fellow book club members ahead of the meeting (is that cheating?) I still might go with the one I first thought of (bit like shopping for clothes….) although I won’t have to decide until the night before.

Sometimes,  I wish I could choose a recipe book I love for book club and then get everyone to cook something and bring it along. It could be a new sort of book club. But we might all get really fat…This week’s recipe is French Onion soup. It’s a wonderful thing to eat on a cold winter’s day. Like my search for books, I usually search for recipes online, despite having more than 100 recipe books in my kitchen. This one is adapted from The Guardian’s “How to cook the best….” series which always comes up trumps. Enjoy!

French Onion soup

80g butter

4 onions, sliced thinly

1tbsp plain flour

1 tbsp thyme leaves

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

500ml of medium dry cider

500ml of beef stock (best quality you can get – the more jelly-like the better)

1 baguette

Gruyere cheese

1. Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan over a low heat. Add the onions and season. Cook slowly, stirring occasionally, until they are caramelised and a deep brown.  Using the Aga, I cooked them for 15 minutes on the simmering plate and then transferred them to the simmering oven for 2 hours, taking them out every 30 minutes for a good stir. On a regular hob, just keep them simmering for at least 30 minutes to get a good deep colour.

2. Stir in the flour and thyme and cook for a couple of minutes. Add the balsamic vinegar and half the cider, stirring constantly. Add the rest of the cider and the beef stock, and bring to the boil. Put back into the simmering oven for about one hour (or leave to simmer on the hob for about an hour). It should be like a very thick gravy.

3. Cut the baguette into thin slices and butter each side lightly. Put them on a baking tray in the top of the roasting oven for five minutes (or toast them in a toaster).  Grate the cheese.

4. Check the seasoning of the soup. Ladle it into bowls that can go into the oven, pop the croutons on the top and  mound up the cheese. Pop into the roasting oven, on a baking tray, for 5 minutes while the cheese melts (or under a hot grill). Serve straight from the oven, and remind everyone that the bowls are super hot!.