Food for thought

So, unusually for me, I managed to find the motivation to get out of bed before 9am this morning and trek off to Tesco to do a decent shop. Back in the day when I was 18 years old, fresh(er) faced and slightly more excitable, the idea of going on a food shop by myself simply filled me with glee. I remember first setting foot in Esselunga in Pavia, Italy, about a week after I had left England, and the wide eyed glory with which I surveyed the many aisles.

Food. Lots of it. And I could buy whatever I wanted.

Goodbye garden peas. Goodbye ready meals and frozen chips. Goodbye all meals over which I had no control. Hello experimentation! The supermarket suddenly became an adventure. I arrived every week with my rucksack and my spare bags and grabbed a trolley, painstakingly inspecting every aisle for new things to try and contemplating the delicious culinary creations I was going to make. Those were the days.

Obviously, the novelty soon wore off when I came to a number of realisations about my own organisational incompetence. First of all, I had no idea how much I was supposed to spend, but it always felt like I had spent so much but had very little to show for it. Coming home loaded with bags full of herbs, balls of mozzarella, tins of sauce, exotic fruit that still needed to ripen, and the thought dawning on me that I was hungry but had nothing to eat – why hadn’t I thought of snacks?? The next week I would stock up on snacks, but feel guilty for it and not have enough ingredients to ‘discover’ (as I was determined I would) a brand new recipe which would take the culinary world by storm. Inevitably I began to make lists but, as is my nature, I never stuck to them.

My grandad posted me a book which became invaluable to me. ‘The student vegetarian cookbook’ it was called. There are many on the market these days, of course, but this was one of the first to be published and was so precious to me in those days of relative poverty. Much to the amusement of my Italian flatmates, I began to recreate recipes from my childhood, starting with eggy bread. We started swapping recipes between us and when I eventually left Italy I had learnt to cook with an Italian accent, chucking in a filo d’olio here and there, adding tomatoes where necessary, and never missing a handful of fresh basil leaves. Food was so exciting back then, I wonder what happened along the way?

Nowadays I have lost my passion for cooking somewhat, and rarely make big meals unless I have friends over for the evening. Even then, I always stick to the failsafe recipes such as risotto ai funghi, toad in the hole (with vegetarian sausages, of course), vegetable lasagne and the like. In Pavia I was seeing someone for a short time, and one evening he turned up to see me, fairly unexpectedly, and I realised to my horror that he hadn’t eaten. I could have suggested we go out for a pizza somewhere, but it seemed a bit cheeky. In a rare display of calm on my part, I told him that if he was hungry I could make a meal for the two of us, and no, it wasn’t too much trouble and I’d be happy to do it.

My brain went into overdrive – aargh!! What was I supposed to do??

I shoved him in front of the television and shut myself in the kitchen, putting a pan of water on the stove to boil in order to give me time to think. I thought about jumping off the balcony and leaving him with the number of a home delivery pizza service, but alas we were on the second floor and I did not think I would survive the escape. So I boiled some rice. Then I mixed some eggs with some milk, salt and pepper, adding the mixture to the now cooked rice. I rifled through the cupboard – why couldn’t I find anything even remotely appetizing? And why had I bought a tin of asparagus heads – did people even eat those things?! Aha! A tin of tuna and a tin of sweetcorn. In they went. Before long I was frying the mixture with some olive oil, and my guest wondered back into the kitchen to see what point I was at.

Then, after we sat down at the table with my ‘creation’, he wolfed down every last bite and asked for the recipe. I was left speechless, still in shock from the socially impossible stressful situation of making something from random things in the cupboard. A personal victory, I conceded.

Now, a disgruntled and unmotivated final-year university student, food shopping has become a chore. In fact the only thing that really excites me in a supermarket these days is when I discover Haagen Dazs is half-price, or that there is a buy-one-get-one-free offer on teabags. Despite my adventurous spirit in terms of travelling and exploring, I’ve become a bit of a fraud in the kitchen. I guess this morning’s trip to Tesco really did give me food for thought.