What's For Dinner?

I am a marketer’s dream. I am listening to Nigel Slater on the Waterstones podcast talking about his new book, which is a memoir of sorts, he says. It’s more joyful than the last one which was about the endless misery of his childhood. The story of a boy’s hunger, he called it. Now he’s feeling more upbeat, this time, it’s about the pleasures of food, travel and gardening and he’s compiled it from the stuff he’s written down in his collection of notebooks. The little details of a life lived mainly in the kitchen, he says. I’m not sure about the gardening or the living in the kitchen but I’m straight on to Amazon anyway to buy a copy¹. It’s the crisps that does it for me. If he had to give up every snack and just choose one for the rest of his life, it would be crisps, the plain, ready-salted variety. They have it all, salt, they’re cheap, they’re readily available in every supermarket and corner shop, there’s the crunch, the comfort of potato and starch. They also make you feel quite full, he says. I am kind of with him because sometimes, mainly on a Friday, when I’ve had enough of being organised and future-planning and plating up and wiping and someone asks that question yet again, I say “crisps”. We’re having crisps for dinner. And I think how much easier it would be if we just stopped at crisps, like at those gatherings when you lift your game a bit and do hospitality and make an effort and invite people over and feel you have to provide them with nibbles before the main event to get the conversation going and you empty a few packets into your special bowls and set them somewhere strategic and you hand them an aperitif, one that goes really well with crisps, like wine, and it’s usually the best bit, the nibbling, or maybe it’s just me that reaches for them again and again. And I’ve often thought about inviting people over for crisps, just an evening of crisps. And Nigel said that the posher versions you can get now are actually too much, too heavy, too thick, too oily, too chemically MSG and I thought crisps are kind of a metaphor for life. We think we want the truffle ones or the ones that M&S bring out at Christmas, something better. They’re enticing but, in the end, they don’t deliver. We really want simpler, easier, what we know. And we think we want something big out of life too and, maybe we do everything in our power to get to big, like profiling ourselves and running from A to B and turning up at every event and striving, constantly striving, and maybe we get to what looks like success but it turns out to be quite vacuous and disappointing and we’re dying inside and we realise, it was actually all the little things that mattered, what we already had. “There is so much to feast on,” Nigel says, in life. “These diminutive pleasures are there if we care to look for them, little joys illuminating an increasingly darkening world. They feed the soul and nourish the spirit”.

It can start as early as breakfast. “What’s for dinner?” they ask. They never make any suggestions, my children. They just expect someone else to come up with the ideas and then when they do, they screw up their noses and complain about it because it’s always best to do nothing and blame those who do something. I do a quick calculation. In almost 21 years of child-rearing, bar the incredibly small number of months that the eldest wasn’t on solids or spitting out butternut squash, I have had to think of over 7500 dinners. It used to be the primary focus of my week. Never mind holding down a job, I had meal-planning. And for a while, I excelled at it. I had a blackboard wall to chalk up the details of what was happening at teatime. And for about a decade and a half, I threw myself into it. I was tagine and risotto mum, and I did home-made, like meatballs and fishcakes and dicing my own turnip because ready meals were responsible for all the ills of the world. And I carried brioches in my pocket to hand to them after school to stave off their starvation until I could co-ordinate my pots and pans and present my lovingly prepared banquets because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do within the institution of motherhood. And then around 2017, I stopped. It coincided with moving house. I can’t provide a reason for why shifting location shifted my mindset. But I haven’t mashed a potato now in years.

And this week, my husband did a speech, and he talked about what Michelle Obama said about curating your kitchen table, having the right people round it, your supporters, your friends, those that journey with you and are honest with you and he mentioned his wife and his daughters and I thought I hope it’s ok to just sit down at this kitchen table of his and eat crisps because I’d rather not have to prep anything fancy for it.  

But it’s probably peanuts for me. If I had to choose my forever snack, it would be these, preferably KP, the original ones. It takes ages to get to the bottom of a bag and you never want to finish them in one go anyway and you can walk about with a handful, and they are consistent and suitable to eat in the bath and they work well with an aperitif. And if you put me in a corner at a party with a supply of them and I didn’t have to speak to anyone, I’d be entirely content.

This week is changeover week or so they say in fashion circles. End of September. It’s time to move out of Birkenstocks into boots, out of whatever summer shoe you’ve been limping along in, into something sturdier, according to The Times. It’s also the week when I momentarily give myself a shake and decide to reinvent myself … again. I browse my collection of cookbooks. I have never made anything out of them but strangely, the pile keeps getting higher and higher. Although there is one page in the Hairy Bikers when they renamed themselves the Hairy Dieters which is quite splattered with what looks like tomato because this was the main component of their healthy lamb and spinach curry and I went through a phase of burying spinach in everything because apparently it contained the nutrients I was supposed to ensure my children got. But from October, I will get it together. There will be slow cooking and soups and stews and things in roasting trays. What’s for dinner will involve nutrition. Possibly.

When I visited the home in which I grew up in this week, my mother was wearing a chef’s hat. She was dusting rocky roads repeatedly with icing sugar and arranging doilies and paper cases while I looked on thinking this will skip a generation and even though I don’t have a sweet tooth and much prefer a decent sandwich, I left with a tin of chocolate. And she’s always trying to foist traybakes and sponges and pavlovas and cream on to me because she believes these are the answer to all the ills of the world and I need them. And it’s important to know who you are, whether sweet or savoury, sugary or salty, nice or cynical, an artist or an accountant and what you need in life and one of the main reasons people end up with regrets or teeth grinding or long-term resentment is because they kept taking a biscuit when they’d rather have had a burger and they didn’t know how to say it wasn’t what they wanted.

And Nigel said there are some interesting chapters in his book about things like the under crust where the fruit and the crumble meet and that’s the magic bit in the middle and the pie where you’ve got the pastry then your meat or vegetables and then there’s this soggy bit which is just bliss and the crispy, crunchy bits of roast potatoes that stick to the tin and it’s the chef’s privilege to prise them off. And I thought bits was probably a metaphor for something in life too. And I remembered if you do get to the bottom of the bag of peanuts, there’s bits there too and a whole other cellar of salt. And if anyone asks me what’s for dinner tonight, I’m going to say “peanuts”.

What’s for dinner? Do you have a forever snack? Are you reinventing yourself in October? So many questions. Please let me know. I always love to get an email!

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