The Food of Love

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If you are looking for that oysters-dipped-in-pink champagne recipe (always served wearing red stilettos and nothing much besides), or you want to know whether white shallots from Albania munched at bedtime will rekindle passions, this isn’t the page for you.

I am not withholding information hoping you buy my new cookbook out in stores now (you’re confusing me with Nigella Lawson, it’s easily done!); I simply don’t know and wasn’t planning to find out.

We don’t have oysters or shallots flown in from Albania very often, but we are always a happy twosome in the kitchen, cocooned in the smells and billowing smoke of our dish of the day. Sometimes we are just adding our own twist to a family recipe, or creating flavours of our very own.

My husband is the latter kind of cook, experimental and daring, with a flair for chucking things into the pot and getting it right. I am of the former school; I usually start with a recipe from my mother (or some other accomplished cook in the family), find that I don’t have the ingredients I need, and then, put in tentative new touches, adding more as the pot bubbles and lets off fragrant steam and I gain in confidence, to create a new variation of an old favourite.

It doesn’t always work; I have served my husband, my new boyfriend then, Shrivelled Shrimps in Gritty Tomato, and my visiting family, my usually good Coriander Chicken, in a watery grave.

Sometimes I get distracted, as with the shrimps, when I thought I’d scrub up nice before he arrived, leaving them to simmer. They withered and died instead. That he ate it with pretended gusto was testament to how much he wanted to keep seeing me!

On the rare occasions that our usually happy equation isn’t working, my husband will throw in a fistful of ingredients using his unerring feel for the right quantities, whilst I gingerly sprinkle little bits of this and that; his flavours drown out mine and we end up with a hotchpotch instead of a hot pot. I must admit it works best when he takes the lead and I play apprentice; he is an artist in the kitchen and that’s the only place I’m prepared to be obedient.

My idea of the ‘food of love’ is not any of the exotic recipes peddled by TV chefs, it isn’t even about that old adage- ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’. It wouldn’t be true in our case, would it? It isn’t even true the other way ‘round, because what first impressed me about his cooking wasn’t how good it was (which it was) but that we sat and chatted in his kitchen while he cooked (luurvved the masterful way he crushed the plum tomatoes, by the way!), that it was all done in a jiffy, with plenty of flair but no ceremony, and that the conversation flowed easily through the evening from food, friends, family, films, travel and back again. And that none of it was a chore!

Of course, cooking can be drudgery. I should know, I used to hate the little kitchen in my old house because it was where my ex-husband cooked his favourite food-'ready meals' in the microwave, and where year on year, after a long day at work, I would wash the dishes in the grey light filtering through the ugly lace curtains his father had given us. I didn’t think I would ever enjoy cooking but all that changed when I bought my freedom and the house. Suddenly, the kitchen (minus the lace curtains and the ex-husband) was a charming haven, and concocting dishes with fresh ingredients, an exciting adventure.

I’m no expert (its Dr Ruth you’ve got me mixed up with now and I’m not impressed!) but my experience tells me that enjoying the everyday things together makes a big difference-a shared love of good food and its preparation, or even that most tedious of tasks-grocery shopping. We actually like shopping for food, at farmers’ markets and delis and quaint little fresh food shops, which usually require a drive out into the countryside and necessarily, a picnic on the way back!

So, I don’t know about you but I won’t be buying any pickled Bushbaby brains to take to bed with me anytime soon, local cheese and crusty bread in a wooded copse on a sunny day will do us fine.