Meals for One

Up until now I have never had much need to cater for one. Even as a student I was cooked for as part of my halls of residence deal. Bizarrely (we are talking Aberystwyth I'll admit) I was stuck on a campus populated with librarianship students and boys from the surrounding hill farms, sent down by their parents for a bit of taming and a diploma in animal husbandry. It wasn't a marriage made in heaven and led to much shrieking by the librarians as they found dead lambs in their baths and their carpets doused in slurry. Sadly no one ever retaliated by balancing Library of Congress indexes on the tops of barn doors or stamping 'overdue' on the pregnant cows, but the food was good and aimed at the farmers.

Later I shared a house with three Northern vegetarians. They didn't like me much: I was from the south, my dad wasn't a miner or steel worker and I came from public school. To maintain the status quo I became vegetarian and shared cooking. It was OK until things in the house got so silently aggressive that I had to make a small stand. I went out to the butcher and bought a bloody and substantial ox tail and slow cooked it in Guinness with herbs and dumplings, moving on later to rabbit pie, pig's trotters and chicken livers. I was tempted by the thought of a pig's head, but the oven was too small. The vegetarians were livid, but hey, what could they do? Funnily enough they all forgave my soft southern ways around the time they left college and wanted jobs and accommodation in London.

I've not really got the energy or the need for retaliation cooking while on the island. I certainly haven't got the time for the slow cooking of slightly controversial cuts of meat. No, after a long shift at the factory heaving mild steel and sweating in the heat of the furnace, I'll be coming home to a veg based stir fry. Oh how my old flat mates would be proud...