Soups, sandwiches and surviving another week

 

It seems we have finally made it to the last week of January. I know ‘seems’ adds a note of doubt to what should be a hard fact, but given that this month feels like it’s lasted approximately two and a half years, I don’t entirely trust it to hand over to February on time.

It’s been a long and tedious month. Down here in Kent we didn’t even get proper snow to enliven things, just lots of rain. I seem to have lost my enthusiasm for food –  not my interest in eating  it (which would at least have been useful for shifting the remaining post-Christmas weight) but for thinking about it, planning it, cooking it, etc. Reading  cookbooks, which I usually enjoy, feels like a chore. I can’t be bothered to cook. It’s largely a kind of existential boredom: I am bored of juggling meal planning with what can be delivered and when, I am bored of only ever eating in my own house, I am bored of… well, I’m bored of everything currently available to me, pretty much.  I suspect I may not be the only one feeling this way…

I have thought of a way of challenging myself which has produced at least vague stirrings of interest; the occasional synapse firing. More on that later. First, some of the meals I have managed to persuade myself to make.

Last week was bookended by two soups. The first was definitely part of my January health kick: Mushroom and Jerusalem artichoke soup, from Hugh F-W’s latest healthy eating book. I made this in a fit of enthusiasm when we got some Jerusalem artichokes in a veg box, and stuck it in the freezer. As it was defrosting, it looked a bit... beige. And not in a good way. When I put it in the pan to warm up, it still looked a bit…beige. At this point I had a brainwave: elsewhere in the same book Hugh suggests adding harissa coated nuts to a soup. They’re easy to do, toast nuts (cashews in this case, his original was almonds) then remove from the heat and stir in some harissa. The soup was actually tasty, despite its beige appearance, but the harissa nuts made a meal of it, and were delicious.

Beige but tasty soup, plus nuts

The other soup was the Gill Mellor carrot with lentils and almonds that I’ve blogged about before – except this time I used mixed colour carrots, so it came out a sort of purply colour, even though it contained only one tiny purple carrot. So it didn’t look as attractive as last time but it still tasted good.

Note to self, do not use purple carrots for soup

My two favourite meals of last week were two sandwiches, which are probably the two poshest sandwiches I have ever eaten. The first comes from Max’s Sandwich Book, one of my Christmas recipe books. It was mortadella, artichokes in oil and truffle mayo on ciabatta. It’s based on a sandwich from a famous Florentine café, and it is very, very good. The other sandwich was invented by me: gruyere and minced truffle toastie (I love truffles, I got a gift set of little jars of trufflely things for Christmas), with sides of left over artichokes from the previous sandwich, crips and radicchio. 

Honourable mention must go to another meal, cooked by the husband: baked ras-el hanout fish with cauliflower. He does offer to cook, but he requires so much sous-cheffing (including his need to have the recipe read out to him when he can’t remember what to do next, rather than just looking at it himself) that it isn’t usually worth the effort (he does do most of the cleaning, so it’s not an unfair division of labour, even though it gives me ample opportunity to get bored with cooking). This one – from one of the Roasting Tin books – was fairly simple, meaning he needed minimal assistance. It looks a bit beige when it comes out of the oven, but you then scatter it with pomegranate seeds and mint leaves, making it a much prettier prospect. Tasted nice too.

Baked spicy fish

One of the nice things about this meal was that it was something news, that I haven't tried before. This brings me to the afore mentioned challenge: to get myself out of my boredom rut, I have decided to have a week of cooking entirely new meals, starting next Monday. Hopefully without familiar meals to fall back on, things will start to feel more interesting. Wish me luck…