Read books, repeat quotations

15 July – Sneakily plotting, most likely I kidded no one so much as me. I assumed that anything I wrote was incomprehensible, written plumbing depths of unfathomability and bewilderment, written to understand myself a little. One part of my gauzy sneakiness, hidden from me (perhaps transparent to others), was that I was taking a wonky, tremulous path, a free-form “let’s see where it takes us” escapade, embracing the spontaneous, hugging chance, while all the while I was holding tight to a comforting narrative.

Living and telling the tale

6 June, 2011 – I palisaded my mind, and did so for a little too long. Bolted the door and fortified from within. Immune to outward sensations, I stopped tasting, living, expressing myself. Stopped enjoying life’s absurdities. Rattled in ways that I didn’t begin to understand; both shaken and stirred. Taking down the spikes, cooking again, I emerge blinking in the sunlight. With scars, yes, but nothing more than briar prickles around the ankles. Roused, I ask a different and better hotchpotch of questions: not ‘Do I have a sense of taste’ and ‘Can I cook?’, but ‘Which tastes do I like?’, ‘What do I want to cook?’, ‘Which tastes do I want have?’.

I’ll take a chance

30 May, 2011 – Pitiful broccoli. Bought with the best intentions, now neglected, withering from within. Straining in shrink-wrap at the bottom of the fridge. Consuming itself, burning sugars once stored for blooming and laying down woody fibres.

Life is not too short to blister a red pepper

15 May, 2011 – In the kitchen I have been tiptoeing carefully. Two Pyrex bowls tumbled from the top of the fridge – a narrow escape for the gin and sherry vinegar, but taking the top clean off a glass bottle of rapeseed oil, splintering the bowls and scattering across the parquet a thousand shards, from the chunky to the near-invisible.

Doing things by halves

1 May, 2011 – I have before me a plate of charcoal and chalk – sort of, for this chapter is out of sorts, a collection of posts that I will not write. In my imagination will remain the idea of putting down in detail the moment of deception and discovery when I happened across an amphetamine-based appetite suppressant, the agonist for our first full-throttle argument. I had stumbled over a realisation, the revelation that we were different, that we had differing views of food and different pharmaceutical tastes. I thought for the first time: you are not who you say you are, or indeed who you think you are. That post will go unwritten, at least in the sense that I shalln’t connive to russell it up into dish. Sometimes it is best to do things by halves.

Hilarious at the time, but

10 April, 2011 – Coriolanus vows that he’ll “never Be such a gosling to obey instinct…”. Wary of martial braggadocio, hyperconscious to the perils of elevating reason above intuition, I want to charge – am spurred to charge – in the opposite direction: to trust again my instincts, though not, necessarily, to embrace goose.

A Just In Case Story: How the Stew got its Heart

20 March, 2011 – I wrote a memo. The title is prosaic, but nails it: ‘Plan for becoming a better cook and eating better while not letting it dominate my life’. The memo reads as though it was similarly rushed, which it was. A cry from a hungry heart, it begins by solemnly stating ‘The Issues At Hand’. These include: ‘I want to eat well at every meal’; ‘I would spend every waking hour on food, if I could’; ‘There is a constant bombardment of sources of distractions: Books which I own, books which I think I ought to buy, newspaper articles, recipes already collected but not yet tried’; ‘The sense that there is always more out there’.

Swirl! Sizzle! Wilt!

7 March, 2011 – I have little interest in gonzo food writing, such as when a fearless chef seeks out ever more exotic delicacies that prove almost invariably to be insects. Not that I find it particularly repugnant, more that it’s a bit boring, and besides, I have alighted upon something much more piquing, and more stomach-churning. The flesh which makes me feel decidedly queasy is people – or rather, more exactly and more honestly, the thought of writing about real people. To serve up others as subject matter feels like taboo… But it is unavoidable, and so I have a trick – developed to settle and distract the mind – which makes it a little more palatable.

Intermission

2 February, 2011 – [A quandary, something to ponder during the break.

I started the unpalatable truth to see if I could cook and write myself out of a rut, to see if writing, thinking, tasting could effect a change. I now have a problem: it is working.

Chocolate is Dark

18 January, 2011 – This site is not search optimised, not linked to, commented on nor ‘liked’. To be an internet sensation I’d have to take another route, and I thought I had hit upon it when I was assaulted peddling up Streatham Hill. This is how I was not happy slapped but very happily slaked.