Solo Food. Janneke Vreugdenhil
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Название: Solo Food
Автор: Janneke Vreugdenhil
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Кулинария
isbn: 9780008256685
isbn:
The soup tasted fine, even cold. Not that this improved my mood, but at least my taste buds noticed. And my mind noticed that my taste buds noticed. I observed that something inside of me was still capable of making observations. And as I sat there in the doorway eating my soup, running circles inside my head, the sky suddenly turned black. Really black. As if Judgement Day were upon us.
A storm of apocalyptic proportions came rolling in over the rooftops of the neighbours at the back, and within a minute it was blowing and raining harder than I’d ever seen it blow and rain during a Dutch summer. Damn – the sofa. I ran out with some plastic sheeting. Pelting rain. Galeforce 3 million. Plastic sheeting fighting back. A four-storey roof garden with no railing. It flashed through my mind that if I fell off now, I would be rid of it all. In the meantime, my body was, luckily, doing its utmost to save both my landlord’s sofa and my own skin.
I sat inside, on the freshly oiled floor. I cried. Pretty hard. With mucus and sobs, the whole works. I didn’t think I would ever stop, but then all of a sudden I did. I stopped crying and started to laugh. Sounds pretty hysterical, I know, but that’s how it was. Then I thought: I’m still alive. Yes, it all sucks big time, and, yes, everything’s down to me from here on out, but I’m still alive.
As I drank down the last drops of the cold carrot soup, I resolved that, first thing the next day, I would go out and buy a hose so I could hook up the cooker. And soup bowls. And a few pans. A cutting board. A knife. If I was going to be on my own, I was at least going to take good care of myself. After all, no one else was going to do it for me.
What I’ve learnt along the way
For more than a year and a half now, I’ve been on my own part time – my sons live with me half of the week, so that bit doesn’t count as alone. The other days I live solo. I put out my own rubbish, replace lightbulbs, top up the boiler, do laundry. And I cook. Do I wish there was someone who would do one of these jobs for me, even if only now and then? Well, sure, sometimes I do.
But more and more often I don’t. It took a while, but I’ve discovered I can live on my own just fine. I have to admit, though, that cooking was the hardest thing of all. For the first nine months my evening meals consisted of supermarket soup, bags of crisps, toasties, fried eggs, mayonnaise, avocado and anchovy sandwiches (which are delicious, by the way!), Indonesian takeaway from the shop around the corner and sometimes just a bowl of oatmeal. Thank god, friends would invite me over from time to time and lovingly feed me healthy home-cooked meals. Then, slowly but surely, as the rawest of my grief over my broken marriage began to recede, my interest in food returned, and with it my enjoyment of cooking. I no longer bought ready-made soups but made them myself. I cooked rice and stir-fried vegetables that I flavoured with ginger, chilli and soy sauce. I sautéed a piece of salmon or fried a steak and ate this with a salad. I cooked spaghetti and made a sport out of getting the sauce ready in exactly the same amount of time as it took to boil the pasta. I ate fewer meals in bed, staring at my laptop, or sprawled on the sofa in front of the television, and more of them sitting at a proper table. I started to stock my new kitchen with a decent supply of basic ingredients so that on busy days, when I came home late, I could still throw together a quick meal. And I started to have fun with it. ‘Check me out!’ I would say to myself as I sat there all on my lonesome, digging into a delicious plate of risotto. Candles, music, glass of wine. There in the kitchen, during the second half of those first eighteen months following my divorce, I learnt to take care of myself again. I was used to cooking for other people – for my husband, my children, my relatives and my friends – crikey, sometimes I even cooked for the entire street. Cooking was my way of giving pleasure to others, and now I was learning that I deserved that kind of pleasure too. Now I know that cooking for yourself is nothing less than an exercise in loving yourself.
Solo is the new togetherness
More and more people are living solo. Young people, old people, people of all ages. Like me, some of them are divorced; others are widows or widowers, or simply haven’t yet found the love of their life. Whatever the reason, more and more people are consciously choosing to live on their own. According to Statistics Netherlands, there are currently more than 3.3 million one-person households. This number is only expected to increase in the decades to come. So, singles are on the rise, and not just in the Netherlands. In Britain the number of people living alone doubled in a generation. More than half of all North Americans are single – that’s nearly two and a half times more than in the 1950s. This kind of demographic shift will inevitably have far-reaching economic, political, sociological and cultural consequences.
Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the statistics, what I’m concerned with here are the culinary consequences; all those singles who – maybe not every night, but very often – are tucking into their grub on their own. So what does this look like? There’s a persistent, clichéd image out there of the single man or woman sitting slouched in front of the television and shovelling down microwave meals night after night. Or worse yet, eating leftover baked beans straight from the tin by the cold light of the fridge. When I asked around among my single friends, I was relieved to find that things weren’t quite so bad. People in single households actually do cook, but almost everyone also admitted that they found it hard to keep their solo meals somewhat interesting, healthy and varied.
Although my little survey may have been totally random and unscientific, the findings are consistent with bona-fide research. On the whole, the meals of people who eat alone are less nutritious than those eaten by people who share their table with others. Singles generally have a more limited diet and eat less fruit, vegetables and fish. These facts are quite disheartening. Statistics also show that singles throw away more food than families. This isn’t so strange when you consider that supermarkets still focus mainly on families, with most pre-packaged products intended to serve two to four. So, many of those who eat alone are often obliged to eat the same thing two days in a row. Which is, of course, fine now and then, but does not exactly contribute to the enjoyment of a meal. At the same time, there are hardly any one-person recipes in cookbooks, magazines and newspapers or on cooking blogs and websites.
Cooking for one really does require a different approach from cooking for a family or an entire army and is not simply a matter of quartering a recipe meant for four. Solo cooking requires an approach that is both smarter and simpler. The challenge is to make a proper meal using just a few ingredients (because you want to throw away as little as possible) and not spend too much time doing it (because you don’t want to spend an hour in the kitchen every day making something that will take 10 minutes to eat).
Now that solo seems to be the new togetherness, I feel it’s high time to finally take the single cook a bit more seriously. Whether you’re alone by choice or by chance, whether you eat alone every night or just now and then, I hope this book will help you discover that cooking for yourself can be very satisfying. Perhaps precisely because it’s just you. You’re essentially your own ideal guest – you know exactly what this person likes to eat.