Originally published by The Clifton Courier, June 9, 2021

I recently* made quite a grim confession to a friend: I couldn’t remember the last time I went to the supermarket. 

* Yeah, look, when I wrote this back in June, that “recently” was accurate. But I have to point out that this was like two months ago so the accuracy of that “recently” is now up to you, because recentness is relative, when you think about it. I mean, if you define “recently” in terms of days or weeks, that “recently” is out of date. But if your definition of “recent” applies to anything that happened within this millennium and you’re using, say, the release of Lindsay Logan’s song Rumours as a time landmark, then I’m totally in the clear to refer to my confession as recent.

We were talking over the phone so I couldn’t see her face, but I heard it drop. And when you can hear someone’s face drop, it’s a pretty confronting indication that things aren’t good.

But, I mean, it’s not like I wasn’t eating. I was. 

The night before I’d visited two friends who just happened to be cooking up a hunk of rotisserie pork when I agreed to pop by. That day I’d eaten a bowl of the overpriced takeaway salad which was leftover from the lunchtime before. And I was planning on having boiled eggs on toast for dinner. 

I explained this to her, but my dinner plans prompted a groan that told me my testimony did little to mitigate her concerns.

“When was the last time you actually cooked something? Cooking’s fun, it always makes you feel good,” she said. 

I mean, technically boiling eggs IS cooking something, because the act of heating up eggs up falls under the vague definition of cooking. In essence, to cook something is to apply heat. Boiling the kettle is cooking water. Putting chicken tenders in the oven is cooking chicken. But I suppose there’s a bit of a difference between heating something up and cooking. 

So my concerned, mildly (and, I have to admit, justifiably) disgusted friend told me that, the following night, I had to go to the supermarket, get some ingredients and cook them up.

I decided to go with a Nigella Express recipe, which is from an era in Nigella Lawson’s life when she was very, very busy helping her daughter study for exams, meeting vague deadlines and medicating her friend with obscenely chocolatey bickies after a not-at-all fake breakup. She had very little time, but the same appetite. So she relied on a lot of shortcuts in the recipes in her book – using garlic-infused oil, snipping food with scissors instead of dirtying a chopping board and using fortified wine.  

I decided to try her Rapid Ragu and, because I was trying to impress, I planned on whipping up a quick garlicky white bean mash.

The ragu called for lentils and I just naturally assumed that meant a whole tin of lentils. It didn’t. It just needed a few tablespoons of dried lentils. But because I didn’t read the recipe properly I went ahead and ripped the lid off a can of lentils. And because you can’t put a lid back on a can once you rip it off, I was left with a full tin of lentils. 

I could have tipped them into a containers use later but, given my recent track record, I didn’t see myself using them for weeks and knew I’d end up eventually chucking them in the bin.

So I decided to go rogue. Instead of my white bean mash, I’d freewheel a lentil mash. It ended up being a questionable grunge, but I think it would be quite good with a final drizzle of olive oil with some warmed pita triangles. Here’s how to do what I did:

Step one: Say “f— it, I’m just gonna do it” to absolutely no one and whack a large frypan on the hotplate on a medium heat.

Step two: Tip in a good glug of garlic-infused olive oil, because you already spent far too much money on it and may as well use it.

Step three: Roughly chop the white bits at the end of four spring onions into chunks about the size of your pinkie toe (or about 2.5cm, in case you don’t want to put your foot up on the bench to measure said chunks against).

Step four: Fry the chunks in the oil until they get a little soft and a little brown. 

Step five: Decide to add a bit of a butter, ripping a thumb-sized chunk off the already whittled-down block of butter in the butter dish.

Step six: Once that’s melted and bubbling, tip the drained, burdensome lentils into the frypan, along with a dramatic splosh (yes, “splosh” is a standard unit of measurement) of boronia marsala, which is a sweet mediciney fortified wine I bought to go into the ragu and will probably only use for very late night, extremely unwise cocktail infusions. Turn the heat down slightly.

Step seven: Sprinkle in two pinches of salt and a few grinds of pepper.

Step eight: Once the lentils seem to have softened, mash them with the back of a spoon until you’re left with something that looks like cat vomit.

Step nine: Transfer to a bowl and marvel at how disgusting it looks. Stir through half a handful of finely-chopped parsley leaves.

Step 10: Eat with a spoon and wonder if what you’re eating is actually really good or if you’re just really good at convincing yourself it’s really good.