As I browse the shelves of our newly expanded Tesco I wonder if I should try ASDA; they’re a bit cheaper, so they keep saying, and of course there is the build your own pizza counter. But I can do better than that as I engage more with my new roll of head chef. Once I would have retreated to the easy option of a meat pizza with extra meat, instead I set off deeper in to Tesco, to the less visited sections.
A month at home has taught me two very important things. The first is that two and half is the most times you can watch the same episode of Top Gear on Dave, and the second is that food is the one thing we can both look forward to.
The days with a very small baby are very disjointed. Sometimes she sleeps at night, sometimes the early hours of the morning. Our day may begin at nine in the morning, or eleven. The nursery laundry and nappy bins might be filled in a single day or three days. Each day is different with only small, fleeting moments of continuity.
Food provides an island of stability where we can seek sanctuary. Somewhere that is dependable and reliable and predictable. To make sure of this it has to be varied. No matter how favourite your favourite food, it will be distasteful, boring and hated after days and days of the same thing.
So sandwiches get toasted, fish and salad gets included, stilton goes on burgers and almost anything goes with pasta. My trip round Tesco turns in to a trip round the world; Mexican, Thai, Chinese, American, German, well maybe not. I’ve enjoyed it rediscovering cooking that I’ve not tried for years.
Breast feeding gives Lottie a blessed relief from the perennial problem of woman everywhere; it requires five hundred, to a thousand extra calories a day to produce her milk and keep Araminter healthy. In effect she has to eat two large meals a day so can abandon a life time of being careful about what she eats, combined with the release from the food sanctions brought on by pregnancy. Now she can eat all those forbidden foods; she has just discovered grilled Halloumi which I have being waiting months to introduce her to.
A lot of mothers become iron deficient during pregnancy as they make an extra four pints of blood and now is an excellent time to recover from that as steak is back on the menu. Lottie, like all sensible people, can’t see the point in eating steak if it has to be well done, but for some obscure reason pregnant ladies have to have it that way, so it was gone for her for nine months. But not anymore; steak, broccoli, and a big glass of orange juice should get some ferrite in her!
One word of warning before you get all Jamie on this. What ever you make has to be the sort of thing you can just leave in a warm oven once it’s ready. If Lottie’s feeding time and Araminters overlap then Araminter wins every time. The noise if you try doing it the other way round ruins the very pleasure the meal was supposed to produce. If it can sit on the hob with a lid on it for twenty minutes then every one will have a much nicer time. That wonderful full feeling after a really tasty lunch or dinner is just what we need to give us a lift, cheer us up and generally make us feel that being a parent isn’t so bad.
So what shall I do next? Mushroom risotto, or tuna steak with sweet potato wedges and rocket salad? I pause to look at the joints on the meat isle. A roast; perfect for the mealtime which is a moving target.
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