The diary of almost everything

I am one of those people who can be halfway through breakfast and already start thinking about dinner. Not because breakfast has disappointed me, but because dinner is still full of possibilities and apparently my brain likes to have something to look forward to.

I love food. I love cooking it, eating it, talking about it, going somewhere specifically because I’ve heard they make an excellent version of it and spending far too long looking at a menu even though I already checked it online before leaving home. I can be perfectly happy with something simple in a pancake restaurant and equally delighted by a tasting menu involving twelve courses, three types of foam and a waiter explaining what I’m about to eat with the solemnity of someone delivering important medical results.

This has always been fairly normal in my family. We were enthusiastic eaters and willing to try things, although it’s worth remembering that what counted as adventurous food in the nineties was rather different from what counts as adventurous now.

There was, for example, the pesto incident.

My mother had made something involving pesto, which at the time apparently represented such an ambitious departure from our usual culinary landscape that my father announced he didn’t like it and an argument followed. I don’t remember the exact details, but I do remember the general sense that an Italian herb sauce had briefly threatened the stability of the household.

Today you can buy pesto next to the sliced cheese.

This is one of the reasons I think learning to eat is an actual thing. Sometimes you don’t dislike a flavour so much as you simply don’t know it yet, and over the years my own curiosity about food has only become worse. I want to try the unfamiliar thing on the menu, I want to know what someone does with an ingredient I’ve never cooked before and, naturally, at some point I decided that the sensible way to support this interest would be to buy a new cookbook every month.

For a while, I actually did.

I now own a respectable collection of cookbooks and considerably less evidence that I have cooked my way through them. My original fantasy involved leisurely choosing recipes, expanding my repertoire and becoming the sort of woman who casually knows what to do with preserved lemons on a Wednesday evening.

Then I discovered Ottolenghi.

I love his food, but opening one of his recipes can occasionally feel like being sent on a culinary treasure hunt. I’ll have garlic, cumin, olive oil, lemons and an already unnecessarily extensive cupboard of herbs and spices, only to discover that dinner also requires one tablespoon of something I’ve never heard of, available from one specific shop and apparently essential to the structural integrity of the dish.

So I buy it, use one tablespoon and it then lives in my cupboard until 2029.

I’ve therefore relaxed the cookbook project somewhat. I still buy them, I still love them and there is another one coming out soon that I already know I’m going to want, because apparently owning cookbooks and cooking from cookbooks are two related but entirely separate hobbies.

When I cook for myself, I’m fairly relaxed. I’ll try something new, improvise, change ingredients and generally trust that dinner will turn out fine. Cooking for other people, however, introduces a completely unnecessary psychological element, particularly if meat is involved.

Two people are fine, but add a few relatives and suddenly I’m personally responsible for the reputation of beef.

I once bought an expensive piece of fillet steak for family dinner and had everything perfectly under control until my brothers started appearing in the kitchen. They weren’t criticising anything and, to be fair, weren’t even particularly interested in what I was doing, but their mere presence convinced me that the meat was now being observed.

This was unacceptable.

I became so determined not to ruin it that I added too much butter to the pan, at which point my beautiful expensive beef stopped searing and began enjoying what can only be described as a warm bath. There are moments in cooking when you know immediately that you’ve made a mistake, and this was definitely one of them.

I eventually ordered everyone out of the kitchen, transferred the meat to another pan and recovered the situation, but it confirmed something I had suspected for years: if you would like me to cook you dinner, you are very welcome in my home, but once I start cooking you need to go and sit somewhere else. You may have wine, you may talk amongst yourselves and you may even ask when dinner will be ready, but you may absolutely not stand behind me and look at the beef.

The slightly inconvenient part of loving food this much is that I also like fitting into my clothes. I try to stay somewhere around seventy kilos, which is roughly 154 pounds, and having grown up watching weight become a much bigger struggle for someone close to me, I’ve always been conscious that enjoying food and eating absolutely everything you fancy in unlimited quantities are not quite the same thing.

I have no desire to become a health fanatic. I exercise, I move and I eat reasonably well most of the time, but I also refuse to live in a world where ordering dessert requires an explanation.

The bigger challenge in my house is cooking for one, because supermarkets seem unconvinced that single people require ingredients. Apparently we either survive entirely on ready meals or regularly host dinner parties, because almost everything useful comes in quantities designed for two, four or an unexpectedly hungry family.

Want one chicken breast? Excellent. That will somehow cost almost as much as two.

So I buy two, cook both and either eat the same thing again or put one in the freezer, where it joins several other carefully labelled portions I was absolutely certain I’d be thrilled to rediscover later. Sometimes I am, while other times I look at a frozen portion of something I ate three times in February and decide we’ve both been through enough.

This is why I make weekly meal plans during the working year. I decide what I’m eating, make a list and try to buy everything in one go, because every unscheduled visit to the supermarket costs approximately forty euros regardless of what I went in for. Apparently popping in for coriander requires cheese, coffee, berries and something interesting from the bakery.

Summer holidays destroy this system. When it’s warm, I have no idea on Monday what I’ll fancy eating by Thursday, and after spending the day somewhere lovely, cooking can suddenly seem far less appealing than sitting somewhere with a menu. It is wonderful for spontaneity and catastrophic for grocery budgets.

Which is why, strangely enough, part of me is looking forward to going back to work and becoming the sort of person who knows on Monday what she’s having on Thursday.

Not because I want food to become practical. I don’t think it ever will.

I still want to take a proper cooking course one day and learn some of the techniques I admire but currently lack the patience to practise. I own moulds for delicate little decorative things I have every intention of making as soon as I find an afternoon in which I suddenly become a person who enjoys spending three hours creating edible flowers.

It could happen.

In the meantime, I’ll keep collecting recipes, buying the occasional cookbook, experimenting with dinner and trying to maintain the delicate balance between loving food and remembering that portions exist for a reason. I’ll probably also keep buying ingredients for one recipe that then spend the next three years at the back of my cupboard, because apparently I’ve accepted that as part of the hobby.

Mostly, I just really like everything that comes with food. Deciding what I’m going to make, trying something I’ve never cooked before, the smell coming from the oven, feeding people and knowing halfway through breakfast that I’ve already got something particularly good planned for dinner.

Just don’t come into the kitchen to see how it’s going.

Especially if there’s beef.

-Sophie Quinn