I am pleased to announce that I am now an Instagram influencer. In the past week I have posted photos of food prep, dish photos, and the aftermath of a morning jog. It is shocking to myself from two weeks ago that I have reached this stage so quickly. A friend DMed me saying “I have unfollowed everyone posting their daily food regimen, but I’ll give you a pass”. I know where he’s coming from. This kind of oversharing is something I’ve tried to stay away from on social media in the past year or so. But I suddenly find myself far more lenient in times of crisis. A bit like that meme going around which says if you want to pronounce the L in salmon, now’s your time to shine because we’ve got bigger fish to fry (sorry, not sorry).
Allow me to transport you briefly to what I now call “The Before Times” when corona was a beer you shoved a wedge of lime into. Up until about a year ago I had never cooked anything voluntarily. And when I did it was never particularly healthy or flavourful. I saw cooking as a bit of a tedious chore, and I’d grill something or pop a frozen pizza in the oven if there were no opportunities to go out/order in or have a meal cooked by family and friends. I didn’t see this as any kind of personal failing because I did lots of other stuff normally considered domestic. I have a long and public history of loving ironing. I have meticulous rituals around cleaning my iron, and consider settling in to make some shirts nice and crisp a therapeutic experience. I clean almost compulsively, to the point of making dinner guests uncomfortable as I plump up and fluff pillows on the sofa while they're sitting on it trying to have a nice evening.
But it became clear that my inactivity in the kitchen, beyond rummaging from Creme Eggs in the cupboard, was starting to create an imbalance in household task distribution (ie my wife told me I should cook more). I graduated from line cook to sous chef, while still staying at the stage where I couldn’t fuck anything up. Of course, I still managed to fuck up the intricacies of dicing up an aubergine. Then on a trip to Brussels about a year and a half ago, I was staying with a former colleague. He and his partner cooked up something wonderful out of a box with a green logo down the side. I jotted down the name and ordered my first HelloFresh box as soon as I got back to London.
I’d heard about services like it in between cute MailChimp (mailkimp?) and Squarespace ads on my favourite podcasts. This kind of recipe box (like BlueApron, Mindful Chef, etc) does a couple of things that help the novice cook. You make meal decisions a week ahead, you get a box with exactly the right amount of ingredients, and you get step-by-step instructions with photography. It is - and I cannot stress this enough - incredibly difficult to fuck up a recipe in a food box like this. The dishes aren’t necessarily simple, and at first I was filled with terror at getting through the steps on time. I’d often stand there in a cloud of smoke wafting up from the stove top wondering why I couldn’t figure out something billions of people do easily.
But over the course of the various dishes I settled into a more easygoing kitchen persona. Less Gordon Ramsay mid-breakdown, more Nigella delicately peeling a garlic clove. I had techniques for dicing now. I knew what to expect when I added ginger to a dish. I knew how to tell it was doing the right things. I figured out I needed to see what I was making - which means I hate recipes that involve the oven. I even got cocky, improvising away from recipes. And that’s the main thing actually starting to make dishes you enjoy gives you: confidence.
These past weeks, as our homes have become the stage to the totality of our lives, people have shared recipes, home workout and yoga routines, snippets from video calls, live instagram feeds. I’ve seen people mock this sudden outpouring of expressiveness, as if it is some kind of exercise in narcissism. But I think that’s misreading the situation. On an average day, maybe these forms of communication could be seen as a bit annoying. Or even a lot annoying, one of the symptoms of our broken age. But in our current context, all disconnected from each other physically, they’re like living in a shared house. Much like living in a shared house, maybe some of our habits are getting on each other’s nerves.
I have loved everyone’s food stories, because they feed into my barely-one-year-old ability to actually do something with that information. I’ll see a tip in a friend's feed and incorporate it into something I’m doing. I even know for a fact that my cooking stories have pushed a couple of friends who don’t see themselves as the kind of people who enjoy cooking to try something out because they thought I wasn’t the kind of person who enjoys cooking.
I think it’s a very odd time to be condescending to people about the habits that keep them sane. Maybe we can go back to that in a month, but in the meantime why don’t we support each other in trying to be healthy at home. That being said, don’t expect a pilates routine from me any time soon.
