Big Dinner/Small Dinner
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“What foods even are there?”
This is the question I ask myself when the task of feeding myself feels particularly daunting. Usually, when I have guests. It’s perhaps an odd question for a food writer to be asking herself, but most of my eating is completely unthinking. When I’m alone, I almost always know exactly what I want to eat. I’ll have a crystal clear vision of a taste and then I’ll make that for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks until I’m like, I’d rather die than eat that again, and then I eat something else.
I am a creature of habit, and it’s that time of year where habits start to fray. Late sunsets and warm weather means one often finds oneself arriving home past dinnertime, schedule out of whack, cancelling tomorrow’s workout class. Whole weekends slip by without doing the laundry. Suddenly, everyone wants to hang out and do things and it’s that point in the year where the months stop feeling long and you get those fleeting intrusive thoughts of Summer has barely begun and it will be over before I know it.
I pot my tomato plants in the next size up and I think about their whole life cycle. Soon, I will harvest my first crop, and then I will harvest my last.
As ever, it’s an interesting time for my brain. At the start of the year, my friend Alexandra and I agreed on a Back to Basics mindset. Ourselves, our friends, our craft. I hunkered down big time, aided by the cold and the 2:45 pm sunsets. I read and wrote for hours every day and planted so many seeds that are still taking root. And then, as it always does, the ground broke and the snowdrops clawed their way out in those precious clumps across the park. Blossom season is when my brain comes alive and now is the time that I find myself struggling to settle into that state of living. Spring is a period of consistent, day-over-day growth for me in terms of feeling and then suddenly, in early Summer as the leaves have set it, I plateau. And then I must realign. I have more energy but there are more places to put it—I have more daylight but seemingly less time.
And of course, I still have to feed myself. And the fields, and thus the farmer’s markets and the grocery store aisles, have come alive, foisting upon us a thousand delicious things all with short peak seasons. Where one spent three months eating squash, one now has approximately two afternoons to find and consume as many mangoes as possible!
It’s an adjustment. Luckily I have been working on a set of dual brain exercises I call Big Dinner and Small Dinner, to great success.
Big Dinner
As you might know, I spend my Fridays cooking in a community kitchen. If you’re in London, you might want to stop by! I’ve cooked in several community kitchen projects and they’re all a different type of brain exercise; in one, several years ago now, I would just turn up and go through a massive shelf of donated goods and try to make it into something nice for about 200 portions. Here, we get to come up with a dish and order ingredients ourselves with a few basic parameters and a budget.
There are two challenges: first, to keep costs manageable, we rely heavily on a weekly donation of several tubs of mince from nearby fabulous restaurant Cafe Cecelia (I still have not been), ground beef cooked down with tomatoes and parmesan and other nice things. It’s very nice, but it means it takes a lot of effort and seasoning to produce something which does not taste like Bolognese week after week. In the same fiscally-responsible vein, we rely on canned tomatoes and roughly the same selection of vegetables and legumes to bulk out the meal.
So I’m spending a lot of time googling “stews around the world” and piecing together concepts via two or three recipes and a Youtube video. In the last few weeks we’ve made (riffs on) Cuban ropa vieja with arroz congri, Spanish Potaje, Palestinian Sumaghiyyeh with mujaddara, a Laksa that abandoned its recipe about halfway through but was delicious nonetheless, Moroccan Harira, and a tortilla soup, thanks to my friend Max who supplied us with chicken for a beef-reprieve.
(careful readers might recall that the Meat of it all is something with which we are all grappling)
Big Dinner is such an interesting challenge for me: I have to visualize how everything will fill a gigantic catering pot, think of how I will manage and preserve textures so that it’s not just a bowl of mush, and how I’ll season at scale. Every Big Dinner looks basically the same and has similar ingredients, but tastes very different. Stirring a huge pot of stew makes me feel deep, primordial joy. Ladling bowl after bowl scratches an itch in my very itchy brain.
Small Dinner
My sister left today after staying with me, on-and-off, for six weeks. When you live alone, it’s good to invite people to share your space quite regularly, warding off your most reclusive habits. I’m not playing tourist like I might be with another visitor, my sister has been here several times and, on this trip, wants to live as I live. So my schedule isn’t altered much, we walk to Victoria Park most days and break up blocks of work with trips to the corner store or the coffee shop. She joins me as we see friends, attend parties and panel discussions and all the other things I normally do. She cooks with me on Fridays.
What has had to change, however, is the way I cook for myself at home. My lightly obsessive eating habits aren’t exactly good hostessing.
A running joke between my sister and I during her stay is that I eventually ask her what type of chickpea dinner she’d like to have tonight.
There are variations based on what produce looks nice, but essentially, she has her pick of chickpeas/beans/lentils/peas and pasta/rice/potatoes. Usually, when I ask her this question, I’m filled with dread. Another night of trying to feed (and impress) someone I love on a budget without it feeling like oink oink! It’s trough time!!
But it’s actually pretty to make chickpea dinner taste nice. I don’t have to google “stews of the world,” I can riff!
Lane tells me “chickpea” or “lentil” or “pasta” and I just turn my brain off. In twenty or thirty minutes we have something to eat and we’re sitting on my couch watching Ugly Betty. I photograph my cooking but rarely, a result of basement living, so I don’t really have a bird’s eye view of my eating. It was only upon my sister uploading all the photos she’s been taking of dinner into our shared album that I realized I haven’t really served her the same thing twice.
Now that my sister is gone I have to settle back into my normal, solitary routine. Last week, I read Alicia Kennedy’s For Consistency, and revisited Karmela Padavic Callaghan’s Time Crystal. I’ve been thinking a lot about meaning-making after a surprisingly emotional panel during the British Library Food Season on the meaning behind our favorite kitchen objects. Melek Erdal, whose writing I adore, held up her Grandfather’s bent teaspoon, inherited by her Mother, describing all the ways her Mother incorporated it into daily life; it hadn’t been a sentimental object but now it was. The use makes the meaning.
I have so much to write about but have had so little time where I wanted to sit down and write it. I have a few interesting commissions coming up and dozens of half-formulated pitches to put out before the week is through. For dinner, I think I will probably have an Anythingdon rice bowl, for about a week. 🫒
This perfectly describes how I feel about summer. More light, less time. The paradox of so much opportunity for pleasure.
Thank you for every delicious dinner😋