Chocolate chips and a day in the country

When we were kids, Mum’s go-to “someone in your family has died” food was chocolate chip biscuits. The minute someone died she was baking up a batch and taking them round to the grieving family. I’m not sure why it was always the same biscuit but it got to the point where if we came home and smelt them we’d ask who’d died.

Although nobody had died this time I whipped up a batch (possibly my first) yesterday morning to take to Helen – she was staying with her family at a bach in the country. I used this recipe and cut up Whittaker’s Ghana instead of using chocolate chips.

Although the country where Helen was staying wasn’t that far from my piece of the country it seemed a world away. We moved at a glacial speed, ate a leisurely lunch of really great sandwiches, chatted away, went for a super slow country walk and then came home and ate ice-creams and lay in chairs.

Helen is the queen of the foragers – she’d spotted this wild plum the day before so we returned to pick from it. I held the bags, she jumped the fence and picked. I said, “Helen I don’t think you should try and reach those ones or you’ll fall down the thistle hole.” Then we went home.