Good Days,
Days, Okay
Q You publish recipes forDays. Why doBadthis way? Days, Reading
Sort of Days and Old
it
Well, Good, Bad and Okay Days I think pretty much speak for themselves:
I think you mostly know what kind of day you’re having, and probably
you want to read about someone in a similar boat. Reading Sort of Days
came about because I couldn’t not write about books (I tried!); Old Days
because I needed to reassure people that if I was writing about (say) a
suicide attempt, that I didn’t need them to immediately console me, that I
had dealt with it myself before blogging about it.
“
are stories. They are so easy to read, easy to
Q Your recipesfor the not-great-at-cooking-sort, likesome.) They
make (even
are also fun, touching, sad. Do the recipes come to you quite
easily, or does it really depend on your mood? And how do you
know what to cook for how you are feeling?
my Tall Man
is a sort of
green-purple,
the colour of
a blackberry
just turning
to perfect
ripeness
It tends to come from one of two starting points. The first way is that I have a vague idea of a meal I want to eat – so I
have a feeling, and then I whittle it down. It’s about trying to understand yourself better, which is almost a yoga thing:
what do I really want? Who am I? I tend to do this in my notebook, scribbling things down until I work it out.
My notebook from yesterday, for example, reads: ‘Something something roast, buttered greens. Decadent= duck. Duck
with figs, stuffed?? Walnuts too – pickle self? Blitz, stuff – challah bread
crumbs? Pickle, bakery – serve w. chips & greens’. And then I make the
best approximation of that meal I can, and then if it works, I refine it, and
then I refine it again, until it’s as close as it can be to my original idea (or
better). And then I write it up.
The second way is that I have a problem to solve, and my notebooks here
read like a Google search – ‘roast chicken without adding fat’; ‘how to
make linguine vongole more practical’; ‘need to use up weird frozen peas’.
I put that problem at the start of a spider diagram, like a primary school
teacher, and then I write down all the possible solutions. Then I try them;
then I refine them; then I write them up.
My
Q A big part of Eating WithpeopleFingers is
about cooking for other
and having
people around you. What makes cooking
for others special, rather than just cooking for
yourself?
Oh, God, I can’t cook for myself at all. That pasta and old cheese is my staple for myself, or pasta
and ‘weird sauce’, which is a rather horrible concoction of ‘whatever is left in the fridge’. I’m trying
to improve my cooking for myself, as part of a 2015 campaign against self-loathing, but I’ve not got
terribly far. Cooking for other people gives me a purpose; it’s a creative outlet. I’m not totally sure why
the magic works for other people…!