I like to cook a lot. Sometimes I cook all afternoon, one meal after another. I end up with a fridge full of boxed up meals that I can pile through in the week or give to loved ones. Dinner guests are relatively rare these days, in the wake of the pandemic year. Some people have been scattered away from the pestilent city centre. Some people are understandably still reluctant to dive into a full social calendar. Others, like me at the moment, are busy all the time because they’re making up for lost time.

Today I’ve been on something of a comedown from a festival. It was the biggest crowd I’ve been in for years by orders of magnitude. I had a wonderful time, and today I felt very grey in comparison.

To bustle myself along I did some cooking. First I prepared a Japanese style pesto, which was boxed up and put in the fridge, to be paired with soba noodles later. Then I cooked a huge Tuscan bean and kale stew that turned out a bit light on the beans. I skimmed a bit of the pesto and had it with a huge courgette (when does it become a marrow?) I chopped and fried, served with some spaghetti for dinner.

Tomorrow I’ll make red miso and and seaweed arancini from a recipe I’ve never tried before. All of this cooking over the weekend is in aid of having some work friends over for dinner. An excuse.