After the food shopping – deep breath – comes the cooking. We’re contemplating the fruits of our stocking-up forays, wondering what to do with them. And that’s a new situation. Truth is, many of us have let our cooking skills atrophy.

It’s been easier to eat out or ping convenience food in the microwave. But ready meals won’t brighten our time in lockdown, while home-cooked food can be the main highlight of our days.

Here are some ideas for breaking out of the ‘can’t be bothered cooking’ inertia. And when you’re up and running, you’ll have generated momentum, so you won’t look back.

Recipe selection

Most of us have a cache of eye-catching but rarely used cook books. Mothball those that need you to make a special shopping list or hunt for esoteric ingredients.

They will make you feel frustrated and inadequate. Bring to the front the useful ones, those organised around ingredients, such as Jane Grigson’s Vegetable book, seasonality (Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries), or educational ones, (Darina Allen’s Forgotten Skills of Cooking), which teach the kitchen techniques (rubbing in, slow cooking, marinades, and more) that give you the key to making so many varied dishes.

Loosen up

Coronavirus dictates that we behave more like a casual Keith Floyd than Julian Barnes’s Pedant in the Kitchen, the person who is paralysed by inexactitude.

If a recipe calls for ‘Kashmiri chilli’, for instance, don’t get hung up on the Kashmiri thing. Any chilli will work, although the net effect might be a bit different.

Variations due to availability are part of the fun of home cooking. No fresh ginger? Use dried, or leave it out, and so on.

Trust your intuitive ability to modify dishes and learn from the results. Run out of lemon? Try vinegar. Forget about getting it right, just get it done.

Baking for Britain

Current circumstances conspire to make us comfort ourselves with cake and toothsome ‘treats’. But unless you want to come out the other side of this crisis several kilos heavier, don’t get carried away with being a one-person Great British Bake Off.

Baking recipes are much more critical than their savoury equivalents: ratios matter. But even then there’s scope for experimentation.

No plain flour for scones? Try making something that uses another flour instead, like Sumayya Usmani’s recipes for chickpea flour shortbread, or semolina pancakes, in her evocative book, Mountain Berries and Desert Spice.

Rope everyone else in

If you’re fortunate enough to be going through lockdown in company, then get everyone in your household focused on food preparation. Drag them away from their phones and TV.

Adopt Escoffier’s ‘kitchen brigade’ approach, where everyone who is able has a set task and contributes to the meal that’s set down on the table, can have a galvanising effect.

No lolling around then passively consuming what someone else has prepared. Eating at the moment isn’t just one person’s job, it’s everyone’s.

Facing up to the tins

Ok, so we aren’t going to starve in the foreseeable future, and those tedious tins and dried legumes we bought up in frontiersman spirit are sitting there reproachfully. Tinned mackerel or corned beef?

Dried haricot beans, piles of chickpeas and obscure types of lentils? The knack is combining them with fresh ingredients to breath new life into them.

Think Hawaiian poke bowls, old school corn beef hash and rissoles, Italian bean soups like ribollita, minestrone, and pasta e ceci, bean stews, such as Spanish fabada, Brazilian feijoada, and fish cakes.

Forage as you exercise

Whenever you’re out for your daily permitted exercise, be that in a rural or urban setting, take advantage of the free larder of growing foods all around us. Currently the action is all about wild garlic leaves; sniff them out in city parks, or woods. Make a ‘pesto’ from them, and if you’re out of pine kernels or Parmesan, substitute other nuts, seeds, and any hard cheese. You’ll see abundant nettles for soups or stir fries, and lots of online advice about how not to get stung while picking them.

Worst case scenario, rub the sting with a dock leaf. As that persistent ground elder in your garden comes through, get your own back by eating it.

And remember that the odd bitter dandelion leaf works in a salad. Or if you see lots of them, cook them like spinach.

 

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