Whomp, whomp

One day, your tart will come

May 09, 2024

I’ll say it, because nobody else will. Brassicas are the arseholes of the vegetable kingdom.

There isn’t a dish in my repertoire that can’t be royally screwed up by cabbage, kale or even slender broccolini, which is what a supermodel would probably look like if she was made of veg.

Risotto, a stir-fry, a traybake, quiche - you name it, I’ve ruined it by adding something from this family: usually something green and crinkly, knobby, stalky, leafy, smug about its vitamin levels, self-involved, and passive-aggressive. Why do I keep giving them chance after chance? They’re ALL arseholes.

Brassicas refuse to play like a team. They overcook quickly, becoming waterlogged and tasteless before the rest of the meal is ready; or they take unreasonable time to respond to heat, ending up tough on the plate while every other vegetable retains its snap and at least some degree of personality.

And yes, I know cauliflower is having a moment right now; I know you can buy cauliflower rice and cauliflower pizza bases, but the kind of people invested in Making Cauliflower Happen have social handles like NomNomPaleo, GrassFedGirl and KetoKween, use too many exclamation marks, and are far more likely to iron their hair. I would not leave my dog with these people, let alone have what they’re having.

I’d say all this even if cabbage or kale were appealing to look at, which they aren’t, or added flavour that can’t be compensated by something else, which they don’t. And don’t tell me to bung them in a taco, ferment them, puree them over pasta, mash them with garlic or roast them whole. I’m done with the mustard family. They’ve brought me nothing but anticlimax.

I’m done with the mustard family. They’ve brought me nothing but anticlimax.

Last night probably brought this on. I introduced a new meal to my children that I felt ticked the right boxes. It was a warm salad comprising lettuce mix, seasoned wedges of potato, little beef sausages, slices of the previous evening’s chicken, and what I like to call a stealth brassica: tiny florets of broccoli, stir-fried with tamari and pumpkin seeds (I know. How adorable am I?).

It was nutritious, not counting the sausages. It was pretty. It was close to my best work, in terms of using up mismatched fridge items. It was filling. It was a waste of time.

Dinner chat was pleasant. I mentioned my laptop had died suddenly that afternoon and George said “Whomp, whomp,” which is how today’s eleven-year-olds express mock disappointment. (I bet even the French no longer say shrug and say “C’est la vie,” now that we have “Whomp, whomp”. We’re making real progress as a species.)

My children returned their plates to the kitchen and on these was every pathetic floret of broccoli I’d given them, entirely untroubled by a knife or fork. This wasn’t ‘casual Friday’ broccoli - the boring kind, in jeans and sneakers. It was Met Gala broccoli, accessorized and styled to impress, and still it brought nothing of value to the table: only disappointment and broken dreams.

Mine. My dreams.

If I were to fish around in my dislike of brassicas, I’d probably find resentment in the swill. I admit it: I resent that many people are choosing cauliflower pizza bases when they’re free to eat the real thing. I feel their choice is misplaced, because why eat a pale imitation when centuries of Italians have perfected the life-giving science of dough?

If I probed even more, I’d admit I’m experiencing grief and perhaps denial that I’m stuck with these stupid substitutes, no longer able to eat the real thing. I’m on a no wheat diet for the rest of my life. I’m to touch nothing derived from rye, barley or oats either, thanks to an unexpected diagnosis of coeliac disease in my mid-forties.

This meant the overnight whisking away of all the pillowy, crunchy and yeasty things, the joyful and celebratory things I ate to treat myself, or shared with loved ones at memorable meals (baguettes, cakes, biscuits, croissants and doughnuts, tarts, crepes and flans, pies, dumplings, Yorkshire puddings and stuffing, Christmas trifle, Ferrero Rocher, and beer) as well as the chosen foods of my daily life (porridge and muesli, sandwiches and toast, muffins, noodles, and pasta). From this point, anything from a drive-through, a cafe cabinet, a chip shop, a food truck, most restaurants, and almost all shop-bought confectionery and bakery items, now risked making me violently sick.

To confirm the diagnosis, I had a scope pushed down my throat - a tiny camera extending into my small intestine to investigate any damage to its walls. They gave me a fantastic local anaesthetic (five stars, would black out again) and it hit me like a brick, more than it should have. I can remember hearing someone calling Leah, Leah, from a wavy far away, while my body began to shudder from what must have been my gag reflex. Strangely, I felt no interest at all in my own distress. My body was no longer my problem; it was theirs.

They gave me a fantastic local anaesthetic (five stars, would black out again).

It took me longer than most patients to emerge from sedation and I can’t remember anything the consultant told me when I did. Luckily my Mum could recall the facts. She told me yes, I had the disease but the damage they found wasn’t extensive, so my body would eventually repair itself. I would qualify for a free nutritionist’s appointment, to learn how to eat well without gluten. I’d definitely had my last service station pie. I’d had my last Anzac biscuit. Whomp, whomp.

Since then, I’ve learned a few things about being coeliac.

One is that the buffet is trying to kill you. On a recent holiday, the hotel’s head chef gave me a tour of the buffet selection, whose theme was Cuisines of the World. “You can eat this, this, this and this,” he told me grandly, indicating a row of steaming bain-maries. “And this.”

He was right that all those dishes were gluten-free. But six or seven chefs had been in the kitchen, preparing dozens of options for several hundred people - some of whom were around me, busily helping themselves to a bit of this and that. All it took was the wrong ladle in the wrong dish, and I spent the rest of that tropical evening with my head over a toilet, heaving up a pineapple curry.

Another tip for new players is that you can never eat casually as a coeliac. You must always pack a snack. Scroggin in a Click-Clack in the glovebox is your lifelong friend and will get you home in some kind of decent shape.

I’ve spent countless hours taking the wheel on road trips as everybody else rips into steaming bags of luscious fish and chips, while I focus on driving, and searching for the hero inside myself. Chips are certainly gluten-free, but also certain to have been cooked in the same fryer as the batter. You can’t touch this, MC Hammer.

When something like this happens, you begin feeling oddly disembodied and angry at life. You start picturing the children as battered fish and your husband as a sausage. If someone was to track your car on some kind of radar screen, the dot would bounce around like a pinball. You will make it home with a furry tongue and your eyeballs hanging out on stalks. From then on, you will always be prepared, by stashing chocolate in every orifice.

Another thing - don’t take it personally when a cafe cook learns that you’re coeliac, leans out of the serving hatch, windmills their arms around and shouts, “There is flour in this kitchen. It is ALL OVER THIS KITCHEN.”

They don’t want to cook for you, which is understandable. They want you to find somewhere else. You will, of course, find somewhere else. Everyone in the room will watch you leaving to find somewhere else, and some of them will be glad you’re going.

Here’s something else about coeliacs - you can’t complain about it. Being coeliac isn’t as life-altering as many chronic conditions - if you avoid gluten, you’re tickety-boo. Personally, I’m not into comparing diseases as if it’s some kind of parlour game, but as a coeliac there’s usually someone in the room who is much worse off than you are. So what if you’ve only one safe option on any restaurant menu? Just order it, even if you eat it so often at home that your tastebuds have gone dead. So what if ‘I’ll Have the Fucking Green Salad’ will be carved on your headstone? Nobody’s crying for you, Argentina.

HERE LIES LEAH MCFALL

WHO ALWAYS HAD THE GREEN SALAD

RIP

But here are two wonderful things this disease can give you. One, you never need go along with the sharing plates ever again.

And two: eventually there’ll come a day where somebody more skilled in a kitchen than you are, will appear like a woodland faerie. This person is kind and thoughtful. This person will find it no trouble at all to mix six flours into the perfect combination, having invested hours mastering the elusive art of gluten-free shortcrust. This person will offer you a slice of apricot tart.

May be an image of tart — Insanely good coeliac-safe tarts at Karori Farmers Market, baked by Mariela Porrini of Chipa NZ.

You’ve been dreaming of a tart like this since your diagnosis. You’ve missed food like this. It’s light, sweet, crumbly in the right places, and holds its shape; it tastes of butter, sugar and fruit, and not of weird gummy thickeners and raw disappointment. You love this tart so much you want to sleep beside it, waking up with the criss-cross pattern of the pastry across your face.

My dream tart appeared if by magic last week at the Karori Farmers’ Market, at a stand marked with the mighty crossed-grain symbol of the certified gluten-free. (This symbol is difficult to earn, and you don’t see it very often). I bought many slices, carrying them home in a pile of small boxes. I ate one, waited two hours for something bad to happen, and nothing did. I can’t describe the gratitude.

Your dream tart might be something else; but when you bite into it, you’re taken all the way back there, to childhood, maybe, when your world was as simple as bread and butter after school, your body wasn’t a problem, and you could eat this, and this, and this.

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