Ómós Digest #178: Cooking in the sun.
Eating good. Written by Cúán Greene.
It’s been a week of cooking nice things. Fresh things. Seasonal odds and ends. Sometimes complete dishes, others just bits, maybe to be served with bobs, but each made to make one feel good. I put this explosive joy for seasonal cooking down to a sudden change in weather. I overheard an American lady on the phone account in disbelief ‘yes it’s been sunny here. It’s actually been sunny for days’. This emergence of bright weather has had a positive effect on our habits, confirmed when I saw a man-in-a-van contently licking an ice-cream cone — a sure sign that it’s hot out there… or at least it’s perceived to be… Much like my fellow tradesman, how and what I want to eat has also changed. The urge to hand-roll pasta or bake hearty pies dissipated, making way for lighter plates of grilled meat or fish accompanied by vibrantly dressed vegetables, indicative of spring. It’s not overly straightforward to cook food that is both fulfilling and nutritious (and chefs are worse than anyone at it). Pre-covid, when the food I cooked at home was more like ‘restaurant food’, my partner would often say not every dinner has to be ‘a meal’. On weekdays, she’s perfectly content to compromise flavour for nutrition, and while I still struggle with that, I do try to achieve the best of both these days. I won’t say I’ve completely ditched the complex processes and multiple pans used in a professional setting, but I have definitely focused more on nutrition, sooner reaching for herbs, texture, spices and extra virgin olive oil to amplify flavour, over butter, cream and sugar (it now sounds like I was a very lazy chef, but you get the point).