DAY THIRTY-SEVEN- 15/04/2020
When people ask me why I moved to Rome, it’s no word of a lie when I say that the main reason was the food.
I simply love food: cooking it, eating it in restaurants, trying new dishes, reading cookbooks as if they were novels, and meal planning. The first thing I do when a friend or family member tells me they are coming to visit, is plan a detailed (some might say nerdy) itinerary based on what, and where, to eat with them. It’s one of the reasons I became a food tour guide 8 years ago, taking great pride in accompanying hungry tourists around my favourite places to eat, locally. When they ask for my recommendations, I pass on a plethora of tried-and-tested eateries, organised by neighbourhood, so they never have to eat in an overpriced tourist trap again.
While I miss going out to eat (a regular, favourite pastime of mine), cooking has been one of the only activities to bring joy to each of the 37 days I have now spent in lockdown. When I’m feeling blue, all I need to do is open my cupboards, rifle through the ingredients and decide what to turn them into; that’s the part that I love the most, like some kind of Ready, Steady, Cook challenge. However, having lost all my income around 6 weeks ago due to the lockdown restrictions, I can’t justify eating quite the same things as usual, with such gusto. But I relish the extra challenge this presents: trying to come up with a shopping list that will materialise into 3 satisfying, balanced meals a day, for 7-10 days. For someone who usually adopts a ‘little and often’ approach to shopping at the local market, which I am extremely lucky to have on my doorstep (almost literally: it’s 100 metres away), this is no small feat.
Friends have expressed their surprise at this - partly at the fact that I am able to make one food shop last so long, but above all that I can do it on a budget. Having honed these skills over the last month or so, I find that the key is buying filling, nutritious foods such as brown rice, lentils, chickpeas, oats and wholemeal flour, which make up the bulk of the shop, as well as lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. Choosing longer-lasting vegetables such as sweet potatoes, squash and cauliflower is important too, as preservatives are (thankfully) not that common here. I will then top this up with items like cheese (feta, mozzarella, ricotta) or eggs, and extras like sun-dried tomatoes, olives and of course tinned tomatoes. In a sense, I’m lucky that I don’t really eat meat or fish, as this keeps the cost down and means I can spend a bit extra on buying organic produce.
I have been keeping track of these weekly shopping lists, and accompanying meal plans, so will share an example here, in the hope that they might prove useful to someone else, struggling with the dreaded question: what’s for dinner?
Shopping list for one week
Tinned tomatoes
Almond milk
Oats
Herbal teabags
Stock cubes
Coffee
Chickpeas
Black beans
Cannellini beans
Buckwheat groats
Rye bread
Lentils
Sweet potatoes
Fennel
Courgettes
Carrots
Lemons
Apples
Bananas
Beetroot
Cavolo nero
Butter
Olives
Mozzarella
Brown pasta
Veggie burgers
Artichokes
Eggs
Yoghurt
Feta
Frozen peas
Coconut milk
Dark chocolate
Here is what I made with it all (each recipe is designed to feed 2 people, or 1 person with leftovers to have the following day, or freeze):
Meal plan
Breakfast:
Oats with fruit and yoghurt or almond milk
Homemade biscuits
Rye bread toast with honey or jam
Coffee
Lunch:
Carrot and sweet potato soup
Hummus and crudités
Pasta alla puttanesca
Buckwheat tabbouleh
Rye bread with feta and artichokes
Pasta e ceci
Homemade courgette pie
Feta, carrot and black bean tacos (homemade)
Dinner:
Fennel and lemon risotto
Buckwheat risotto with beetroot
Ribollita soup
Sweet potato, chickpea and coconut curry with rice
Turkish lentil soup
Lentil ‘ragù’ with pasta
Frittata with courgette, peas and feta
Dhal
Veggie burgers with homemade sweet potato chips
Apart from a couple of treats like the dark chocolate, most of the above ingredients are pretty inexpensive. It might take a bit of creativity and time to come up with meals that aren’t too predictable or boring (I don’t enjoy eating the same thing two days in a row, which is a problem!), but it’s a good way to pass the time - and the perfect opportunity to try out new recipes and cuisines, which I might not have had the time or inclination to, before.
There are, literally, millions of ideas out there - particularly on Instagram - often using thrifty, store cupboard ingredients that we all have lurking at the back of the shelf somewhere, or that can get the family involved and keep kids entertained for an afternoon. If you’re looking for inspiration, I highly recommend: 5oclockapron, ellypear, cocoinmykitchen, georgiepuddingnpie, Olia Hercules, rocketandsquash, Riverford, Anna Jones and the bigwigs like Nigel Slater, Nigella, Ottolenghi and nytcooking.
For me, it’s therapeutic, and I think of it as a rehearsal for the positively Bacchanalian dinner party that I’m going to throw, when gatherings are permitted once again. Until then, I’ll just keep cooking my blues away.
I love reading recipes, collecting them in several places - cookbooks, cuttings, files, photos, online... I must have literally thousands now and have probably cooked fewer than a hundred, but I imagine that I'm going to do them... one day. And I thought I'd greatly expand my repertoire during lockdown, but coming up to four weeks into it I just.... haven't found the time, with too many other distractions.
I never realised you were such a foodie Emma... to me you're just a slip of a girl.
Good girl❤