Newsletter 2 - Ice Cream For Dinner
‘I’m eating junk and watching rubbish, you better come out and stop me!
The other day, I ate ice cream for dinner. I had eaten a late lunch and so, quite logically, decided to skip dinner and jump straight to dessert. I sat on the sofa and covered two almost-forgotten scoops of pecan ice cream in a miso caramel sauce that I had made for a dinner party a few weeks ago. I ate this whilst watching mindless television and went to bed delighted with my scandalous dinner.
The other day, I got drunk on my own at dinner. I hadn’t meant to, but earlier that day I had heard the news of an old friend’s passing. So I toasted a glass of Alvarinho to him. Then another. Then another. The measly stir fry I had eaten prior to those glasses hadn’t really lined my stomach properly and so, though I had thought that it would be a good way to grieve, I woke up the next day sadder and with the addition of a hangover.
The other day I ordered myself an enormous Chinese takeaway for one despite struggling to pay my electricity bill each month.
The other day I ate my dinner like a feral animal. I had arrived home from work so impossibly hungry but with a fridge so depressingly empty. There were some frozen corn tortillas in the freezer, some posh eggs (Burford Browns, innit) and a pot of Laoganma Crispy Chilli oil in my kitchen cupboard. I hurriedly fried two of the eggs. My perfect fried egg is to get the fat in the pan super duper hot, to make the egg white paper thin so that it is crispy at the edges, then to flip the whole egg for just a few seconds so that the yolk is cooked on the outside but runny on the inside. I heated up two tortillas in a small frying pan and slapped the runny eggs on top of them. Then I dolloped a couple of teaspoons of the chilli peanuts over the egg and rolled the tortillas up like a cigarette. I ate straight from the frying pan, fingers pushing food into my mouth, runny yolk and chilli oil pouring from the bottom of the taco. I don’t think I breathed once, the outside of my mouth and chin was stained yolk-orange and chilli-red, sunset colours. I didn’t use cutlery or a plate or a napkin. I felt so mucky after my meal that I had to take a shower.
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When I am in a kitchen alone, I can never cook in the same objective, methodical way that I cook for other people. Instead, it is utter chaos, I am completely led by my feelings, influenced by the kind of day that I had at work, my bank balance, the phase of the moon or the time of the month. Healthy options fly out of the window, I eat, as Drew Barrymore tells us on TikTok, ‘like an alleycat,’ impatient in my hunger. When I cook for myself, in short, I turn into a child who has been left to their own devices.
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Cooking conforms to unwritten social norms. How we eat, what we eat, when we eat depends on where we are and how we have been raised. But when we are by ourselves, though these factors do still influence how we cook, they don’t necessarily have to. Nobody is watching us so we are quite free to eat as we please. We don’t have to set a table. We don’t have to eat lunch between twelve and two p.m. We don’t have to eat our greens. These are the things that I dreamed of as a child. Eating alone is possibly one of the easiest ways to abandon society, even if it is just for a few minutes each day. It reminds me of a childlike freedom that we might have had before we had learnt The Rules. As children we are reckless. We play. We are learning what we like and in doing so, our eating habits are often quite strange (I remember my sister going through a phase at eight years old where she refused to eat anything other than lasagna). But then we grow up and we learn about closing our mouths when chewing and starter forks and five-a-day. Sometimes I think the only area of my life where I continue to be free, free of comparison or criticism or perfectionism is when I am in the kitchen by myself. I am free to make a mess, to make mistakes, to experiment with only my stomach as a witness. Increasingly, my solo cooking is giving Kevin McCallister vibes. It’s that scene in Home Alone where Kevin parks himself in front of the television and watches violent black and white films whilst eating a 10-scoop ice cream sundae as he screams ‘guys, I’m eating junk and watching rubbish, you better come out and stop me!’ which springs to mind. Or the trolley full of microwave meals during his first foray into solo food shopping. His parents didn’t come out and stop him and neither do mine when I tuck into yet another takeaway at one in the morning.
Home Alone isn’t so much a story of being happy by yourself as fending for yourself until you understand that being in a unit is more important, but as an introverted child from an extroverted family, watching Home Alone impressed on me that it could be fun to eat by myself. This was compounded by another one of my favourite childhood films, the Hollywood adaptation of Matilda. Matilda was a child of an uncaring family who was often left alone. There is one scene where Matilda’s mother leaves the house to play bingo, instructing her to heat up some soup if she gets hungry. Instead, Matilda makes herself a stack of delicious pancakes and quietly reads the paper, something that I still love to do on quiet mornings by myself. Though these are both very different stories, the food scenes in Matilda and Home Alone are gleeful in the way that they show eating by ourselves as children, when no one’s there to tell you what to do. I have taken that sentiment with me into adulthood.
So if you are alone, I suggest that you eat like a child every so often. Eat like your parents aren’t watching. Eat what you feel like. Eat with your fingers. Don’t wipe your mouth. Don’t eat boring soup. Eat ice cream for dinner. As we grow up, we are not allowed, really, to be as exploratory as we were as children. Take the opportunity to do this by yourself in a kitchen and it will instantly reconnect you, not only to yourself, but to your playful side that growing up often does away with.
The next episode of this podcast, ‘Let me take a selfie’ with Los Angelese based photographer, Linnea Bouillon will be out on 21st May.