Why my kitchen floor has chocolate spots
And other food related stories
Caution: Contains pictures of food. Don’t read if you are hungry.
If you enter my flat, you almost immediately walk into the kitchen. It is a big feature of my house and one of the primary reasons why I chose the house. (The second was the size of the Fridge.) In 2021, because I spent most of the year doing a very limited range of sport, I wanted to develop other skill sets. I am simple man, with complex tastes. I don’t like having an identity crisis and I have around 8 cookbooks at home (plus a few on baking) From Ottolenghi, to Jamie Oliver, from Meera Sodha to Shalane Flanagan, I have them all. And frankly, out of all of them only Shalane and Jamie’s books are practical for daily use. I know Ottolenghi has taste and a range of flavours, but man, it:
a. Takes a shit load of time to do a recipe from his book.
b. Usually you end up with an amount of 6 people rather than 4(maybe he means 4 people who eat like they are really hungry. God knows). And I hate wasting food. I made puy lentils with aubergine the Sunday before the last and I finished it last Sunday. By that I mean I threw out almost a bowl of it because it was TOO MUCH and I had been eating it for a week.
It is not like the recipes from Jamie Oliver or Shalane Flanagan don’t produce excess food or use ingredients which you have never heard of. But as an example, I bought corn flour last year for an Ottolenghi recipe and it used 1.5 teaspoons of it, i couldn’t find something smaller than 500g and over the last year I have made that recipe twice. I still have 495 grams of Cornflour in my house. Plus, Jamie Oliver or Shalane Flanagan’s recipes use a heck of a lot less fat(a healthy amount of fat, instead of one which might cause a heart attack.) and they are far less time consuming. 2 weeks back, I made minute mug cakes as a dessert and it took me a sum total of 3 minutes per dessert(From START to FINISH). Hicham El Guerrouj would take 42 more seconds to run a mile.
I am not bashing Ottolenghi, I love his recipes. I have learnt a lot of techniques from him and his recipes but it is just not feasible to do them all the time. To be honest, most people are extremely impatient when they cook. If you start cooking when you are hungry, the last thing you want to do is to wait for two hours for your hasselback(it is a cutting technique) beetroots to roast while pouring melted butter infused with Lime kaffir leaves over them. And sorry to be crass, in the end you have to poop it out the next day. A meal which took 3 hours to make will produce the same fecal matter as a meal which took an hour. Somedays, it is nice to do that if you love to cook(like me.) Somedays you might even enjoy spending 8 hours making bread. But on a weekday, when you have your job and in my case: running, stretching, workout, reading and writing, you cannot spare that time.
So you feel hungry, you pull that dark chocolate out of your fridge.(70% Dark Chocolate from Lindt is my favourite.) Lindt believes in creating chocolate which upon breaking will create more fragments than shrapnel from a grenade. And until you are really careful, some of it finds its way in your fridge and worse still on your floor. And you are tired after 3 hours of Ottolenghi style cooking, so you don’t care or notice those chocolate flecks on the floor and end up walking on them. In the morning, you notice brown spots on your floor and as I do now(after a lot of conditioning), break out the mop and clean it. (Yes, I am blaming Ottolenghi for my slovenly behaviour.)
Cooking is pure joy. When you buy raw veggies, they offer you this palette of possibilities. Tomatoes in the summer, especially the organic ones, can bring up more emotions in you than a Khalil Gibran poem. If you cook them with curry leaves, saffron and coconut milk(thanks Jamie Oliver. The curry only takes 40' btw), it takes you on a pilgrimage through flavour town.
You know what is better? Take a bit of spinach, like literally like 150 grams, take some butter and miso paste(melt them together to make miso butter, takes 2'), heat a pan, add 1 tablespoon of olive oil, add the spinach, miso butter and a bit of garlic powder, cook for 4' (until the spinach wilts) and then flavour with Chilli flakes(from Shalane Flanagan’s book). And serve it as a side with the tomato curry and rice.
Adding color to your table(and I don’t mean paint your dining table), has quite a few advantages:
- You look like a professional chef.
- Everyone likes colors and will be visually impressed. (And then if you added salt instead of sugar, they will judge you.)
- Different colors actually also indicate the presence of various important nutrients in your food.
Also folks, stop counting calories. Take it from the man who had(and still at times struggles from) an eating disorder. Calorie is a unit of energy. The large calorie, food calorie, or kilogram calorie was originally defined as the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius (or one kelvin) (From Wikipedia).
Someone asked me “Isn’t that too much calories” after looking at a food picture and it really pissed me off. You should eat what you feel like and you should eat when you are hungry. Calorifically restricting yourself and adjusting your body to look to good as per societal norms is the root cause why girls and guys end up in hospitals. That’s why I wasted a tonne of food, developed a compulsive lying habit and was 40 kgs when I was 16. Food especially healthy food, food which satisfies you and satiates you is far more important. You want to get abs, then increase proteins, cut fat and do ab workouts. I know exactly what I am eating every day because I mindfully listen to my body and I eat what my body craves. I eat a healthy mix of Proteins, Carbs, Fats and Vitamins + Minerals. Somedays I eat half a pint of ice cream because I just feel hungry. Somedays, I don’t eat any sugar at all. Everything eaten in moderation is ok. There is a famous maxim from Michael Pollen “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.” and I abide by it. I know when to stop and it is very easy, you just listen to your body.
I know what my body needs and you do too. Just be a good listener. You should stop looking at your bodies as tools to do your bidding and instead respect them as sophisticated carbon life forms which host your soul and do your weird bidding all the time. Your body is a privilege you have been issued and not an object to be abused. Respect it and love it, don’t treat it as an object to amuse other people. I look the way I do because I run a lot. In the past when I did not run, I struggled to eat more even if I felt hungry and then I realized that it is stupid and that the body will automatically adjust its calorie requirements. The initial fear came from my past life of living an eating disorder. When I was 13, I was eating a lot because I was swimming a lot(and I was a teenager). In the off-season, I stopped swimming, continued to eat a lot and became fat. Back then, I didn’t know about macronutrients. After some fat shaming, I started swimming again when I was 14, lost all the weight and then in the off season, I did the double whammy of continuing to exercise and throwing away the food so as to not over-eat. Eventually, it became a obsession and I developed anorexia. I was 167 cm when I was 14 and I never gained any height because I threw away the food which my body needed. Don’t be as obtuse as me. If you are fat, you can lose weight in a healthy way. But depriving yourself and always being a calorie counter only makes you unhappy.
Takeout food and my problem with it
If you have a day job and you don’t live with your parents/a partner/have a cook at home, chances are you returned home and saw an empty fridge. You were too hungry and so you ordered some “take-out” food.
Frankly, that is not the worst option in the world. It is much better than the frozen prepared meals you get in the market, because atleast the take out is fresh and doesn’t contain 1 billion preservatives. But again, takeout takes a bit of time to arrive and costs money. And frankly, I have never eaten takeout food where I thought “This is incredible.” Usually, I can cook better.
And so that’s what I do. And guess what, guys and girls, you can do it too. All it takes is a bit of prep work on a Sunday(or any other free day). Basically, find some time, chop 2 onions, 3 garlic cloves and 4 cm piece of ginger. Blend them with a teeny bit of water. Seal in a jar.
Second, always keep a bit of frozen veggies(spinach or beans or carrots) or canned beans(i.e. red beans, chickpeas) with you. And some tomato paste or canned tomatoes.
Heat the pan, add a bit of oil, add the paste, let it cook and then add the spices your one of your exotic friends gave you(Cumin powder or Turmeric powder; you can be friends with me and I will gift you Garam Masala). Add canned tomatoes or the paste, add water and then curry powder if you have some. Add the frozen veggies/canned and let it cook for 10'. Meanwhile, cook the rice or just heat up some tortillas.
Trust me, no take out arrives in 15'. And this will taste better. And cost less. I do this or I just heat some beans in a pan, add frozen spinach to it and then make nachos. Or if I am in mood for some Italian, just boil Spaghetti until al-dente(around 9 minutes) and on the side i make a sauce with veggies and tomatoes. All of these take less than 15'.
Pictured above is some lentil spaghetti with salad(took me around 20' to do, lentils need to boil.) I had come home from work at 21h. And at 21h30, I had this in my stomach. If you anticipate and just keep your pantry stocked, you will never run out of good food and will be able to eat healthily.
Hope this was useful information. Please share with me your feedback or some quick recipes you do. And if you suffer from disordered eating, I am happy to talk to you about it and I would also encourage talking to a therapist/nutritionist depending on the complexity.
Bon appétit.
