The meals with no names
And out of the mouths of babes
I owned the book Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat for a few years before I actually read it. When I finally read it, I got annoyed at myself for letting it sit on the shelf for so long without even cracking open the front cover because what a waste of those few years! I could have been cooking better years earlier! Nosrat begins by telling the reader that the book will teach them how to cook; that after reading the book they’ll be able to make up dishes and not rely on recipes to create complete and delicious meals.
I was sceptical. How can a book teach you how to cook so that you don't need recipes? It seemed fanciful. By the time I read the book, I’d been making my own food for over a decade, and could reasonably follow a recipe. But I read on. By the end, I understood her promise and for the first time I felt like I actually knew how to cook.
When I cook now, I largely follow the principles I learnt from the book: when to salt, what to salt, and how much to salt. Add acid to round out a dish. Don’t be afraid of high heat (though I still remember the solid advice from
on Epicurious that nothing bad happens on medium, so I use medium heat a lot too). It results in usually pretty delicious food, but it also often means that the dish doesn’t have a name because it wasn’t from a recipe that I followed.Meals are always planned around a protein: I’ve got meat defrosted, or beans soaking or cooked, or there’s tofu or eggs that I can use. Then I’ll see what veg that came in the CSA box or that I have in the fridge or pantry that needs to be used up. Sometimes the veg can be cooked with the protein, but more often than not it ends up being a side dish. Finally, after I’ve figured out the protein and veg, I decide which starch will go best — rice? Pasta? Bread? Egg noodles? Potatoes?
Sometimes these choices result in a beautifully cohesive meal where all the elements are from the same cuisine and you might even serve it to people to whom you’re not related. Other times, you end up with a motley collection of tasty but disparate dishes. Both end up with the desired result of everyone being fed.
But the one drawback of the ‘making stuff up’ method of cooking and meal-planning is difficulty in communicating what it is. It can be hard to repeat a dish, because the kids don’t know how to ask for it. And it can be hard to let them know what a meal is going to be, exactly: ‘What’s for dinner, Mummy?’ ‘Meat and veg and rice.’ ‘Oh.’ I think about half of what I cook can be easily communicated with the kids and they know what to expect, but the other half is stuff that I cook with whatever seasonings and flavours take my fancy, and those are the meals with no names. Want to know what’s for dinner? Food.
Speaking of kids…
There are a couple of food-related kid moments that happened recently that I thought nicely highlighted some other important food themes. One moment was not from one of my kids, but from one of my kids’ friends (or one of my friend’s kids? When your social life is largely based around other families with similarly-aged children, it’s hard to know whether it’s the adults who are friends or the kids). We were over for dinner at a friend’s house, and we’d brought watermelon and berries as our contribution.
The fruit was from our CSA box and the farmers’ market, and we got to talking about the food at the farmers’ market. This family goes to the same farmers’ market as us, and buys berries from the same stall. When I mentioned that the berries were from the farmers’ market, the seven-year-old said, ‘Oh yeah, I know those berries. They’re the ones with the sugar on them.’ There was a moment of confusion — am I really that unobservant that I hadn’t noticed a section of the stall with sugar-sprinkled berries? Is he talking about a dessert stall that I hadn’t seen? Until I realised that no, he was talking about the same berries that I’d been buying every week for the past year but he thought there was sugar on them because they tasted so much sweeter than the berries from the supermarket. I thought that was an excellent endorsement of the farmers’ market berries.
A second kid food moment happened a few nights ago. My dinner plan that evening was just leftovers — Tilly was with grandma, so it was just Charlie, my husband, and me. Charlie and I were at home, just hanging out, reading and playing. He turned to me at about 4:30pm and asked, ‘When are you going to make dinner?’ I replied, ‘I wasn’t going to make dinner; we’re having leftovers. Do you want me to cook?’ He nodded, so I asked him if I should cook the broccoli and carrots to have with our leftovers. He said yes, and requested them to be both steamed and roasted. So I ended up making steamed and roasted broccoli and carrots despite the initial no-cooking plan.
That question from my four-year-old made me realise how me cooking dinner is such an ingrained and routine part of my kids’ childhoods. I mean, it’s kind of obvious if I ever gave it a moment’s thought — I had just never given it a moment’s thought. When I pick them up from school on the days where it’s a later pick-up because of extra-curriculars, 90% of the time to get them away from their friends and to hurry the hell up, I’ll say something along the lines of ‘We have to go, I need to make dinner.’ Once we get home, the first thing I do is go into the kitchen to either start or continue cooking. They play and read and watch stuff on the iPad with the sounds of cooking in the background. I guess it has become such a familiar routine that on a day when there were no such sounds, and I just continued playing and reading with Charlie, he was cognizant enough of the usual pattern that he asked me when I was going to start cooking. Which ironically guilted me into cooking.
Vale Michael Mosley
Dr Michael Mosley was a British doctor and broadcaster for the BBC who passed away last week whilst on holiday in Greece with his wife. He is someone I never met, or had any kind of interaction with, but his death has made me quite sad. By all accounts he was a kind, generous, funny, humble, and intelligent man who was loved by many. Among his many TV and radio/podcast shows, he was the host of Just One Thing, a podcast I’ve been listening to for a few years. With all the different health advice there, what is just one thing we can do to improve our lives? Each episode had one thing, a person who was willing to try that one thing for a week, and an expert or two to explain the science behind that one thing. I love the podcast and have written about it before — a lot of the one things are food related.
Michael’s last interview aired in a podcast that came out today, There’s Only One Michael Mosley. It’s introduced by Chris Van Tulleken (another doctor and BBC broadcaster I really like). The interview was conducted at the Hay Festival just a couple of weeks before he died, and was part of the ‘Just One Long Thing’ series, where he does more in-depth interviews with experts for their top five tips on a particular topic. This final interview that he did was with a psychologist, Professor Paul Bloom, and it was fittingly and heartbreakingly on how to live your best life — which arguably is exactly what all of Just One Thing is about. What a great loss. He will be very missed.