I ran out of steam with cooking a little bit this weekend. A lot of that probably has to do with some gargantuan hangovers I inflicted on myself a few days in a row. It also has to do with the fact that I’ve been a victim of my own success in using what’s already in the cupboards. I used up those spices that have been sitting around. I used up those frozen sausages in the freezer. I used up the dregs of that short-grain rice. The upshot is that my cupboards and my fridge are more fundamentally empty than a quick shop could fix. That’s a deeper hole to set off from when you need to cook something.
Running’s been difficult lately, but swimming in the ponds is getting better each week. It’s cold enough now that it burns your skin all over when you get in. It’s cold enough that when you feel the cold on your legs as you step down the ladder you think, “not everybody would do this”. Very self-satisfied of me. When the burning fades off, this sudden feeling of wellbeing washes over.
It’s getting darker and colder, but so far I don’t mind. Like I said before, I’m cooking a lot of satisfying food. It’s still warm enough to get into the Hampstead Heath ponds every Saturday morning. The crowd there is thinning out and there’s now a pleasing corps of batty and rich ladies of a certain age who we’re starting to see on a regular basis.
Leftover homemade pesto with udon noodles
I’m doing more in those dark evenings. After the office on Thursdays, we’ve been going to the pub in central London, which feels like behaviour from a previous life. I’m meeting up with friends to watch films in the cinema. The new James Bond movie was packed out.
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.
London had its first snow day of the winter. We set out for a run in the mid-morning when the first specks starting to stick to the frosty tops of parked cars. By the time we were circling a park it was coming down thick. The roads were coated with a layer a couple of inches thick and quickly became communal playgrounds for bored families. Sleds emerged. Where do the sleds come from?
I think the last film I saw in the cinema before they all closed was The Lighthouse. After that weird nautical trip we emerged from The Ritzy in Brixton in the middle of the afternoon, dazed and out of sync with the normal world where people were charging up and down the pavement. The cinema was only a couple of minutes down the road from where I was living at the time; it didn’t seem like a big deal.
I’ve spent a lot of this year living in the worlds other people have made for us. The world of our senses is either too boring (the insides of our homes, dinner arriving in cardboard at the front door) or too awful (bodies in refrigerated trucks, forests burning, and police brutality) to enjoy, so I’ve been turning to media more than ever. It’s been mediating my perception of the world, organising the information so I can take it in, or turning it into stories so I can connect with it on some emotional level with my burned out stump of a brain.
I love cooking but the terminology seems very fluid to me until I hear chefs talking to each other about how they prepare an ingredient in a way that sounds so specific. It turns out these words do have distinct meanings that I struggle to hold in my head.
A very awkward Frenglish word. Means frying ingredients in not very much oil but over a relatively high heat.
A larger ingredient like a meat is cooked over a very high heat just to brown the surface. The process that makes things go brown is called the Maillard reaction. Usually things are seared and then cooked over a lower heat to get the middle.
I went and saw Jamie in the park. It was freezing cold today but I had panicked and put on a heavy coat. The hills in Dulwich were unrelenting from the beginning and I was dripping in sweat before I reached Clapham. We spoke about things breaking down, about how much we can endure and how many times we can restart things and change our conditions.
We were up late last night, we’re in a strange detente for now.
