Iused to fancy myself as a special occasion cook, marinating and reducing for occasional wows, but since lockdown I’ve mostly taken over – with as little control freakery as I can muster – doing my full share of proper family meals, well. Does that count as a hobby? Of course not. But when you are writing and reading and wandering and watching for a living, it can feel that all of life is a form of solitary indulgence, so the distractions I crave are generally communal, and simply hands on.
That feeling has become more urgent in the last two years. Having worked from home for a couple of decades, I was used to mostly being alone with the contents of the fridge. Now, there were four of us in the house, Zooming and essay-writing and being lectured online and the days seemed to demand different kinds of punctuation marks.
A few things conspired to make that effort seem more of an adventure than a chore. For quite a few of those weeks and months, in and out of bubbles, we were joined by my daughter’s boyfriend, James, who is vegetarian. It seemed a good time for us all to cut out meat, so that happily concentrated our minds, too: how do we create flavour and variety without the fallback of a slab of protein? (Most of the best answers I found were inevitably plagiarised from Anna Jones or Ottolenghi or Mr Slater.) Then there was the question of supply. I stopped going to supermarkets entirely and got to know the strengths and weaknesses of local greengrocers – my 10,000 steps were usually directed towards a mission for tarragon or Swiss chard. And then, I guess, mental health.
