Almost Like Being on Holiday

My holiday plans for the year have, understandably, gone up in smoke. Everything we had tickets for has been cancelled, emails are still trickling in about that in a miserable flow. And for the last couple of weeks, the world has been a depressing place. Cooking has been less of a refuge this week because we've been trying to use up the contents of the freezer as it desperately needs defrosting (and then filling with exciting things inspired by this post), and the most thrilling thing I've done is make some lemon and raspberry muffins, which I promptly ate instead of writing about.

That said, we've taken a couple of days of annual leave as I'm approaching the end of my leave year, and decided that Friday night was a good time to have a properly fancy takeaway. Not just something picked slightly at random from the internet, no, we went posh and ordered a meal from Arabica in Borough Market - inspired by a Twitter post by Melinda a few weeks ago. You have to order by Tuesday for it to arrive on the Friday, and at some point during the day a box will arrive on your doorstep.

 The box came with instructions on how to re-heat the various things (we had hummus, olives, chicken & pistachio kibeh and lamb kabsa), so we ate our way through them over the evening. We put candles on the table, used the fancy wine glasses and pretended we were actually on holiday - or at the very least out for dinner.

I'd have put it in a bowl, but it looked better like this!

Lamb Kabsa - it lost the garnish but still tasted good

It was bloody marvellous. It was also not cheap, but absolutely worth it. I'm very aware that being able to get this is a hugely privileged thing to be able to do, but also that lockdown has made me appreciate more the things that I'm able to do. I took being able to go out for dinner so casually, we used to do it quite a lot (admittedly, less often to somewhere like Arabica and more often to eg the restaurants on South Bank), and getting this did make me feel a bit like a holiday treat. 

Admittedly, perhaps discussing potential future holidays and looking up night trains in between courses wasn't quite the best plan for being happy with the current stay-at-home situation...