A TASTE FOR LIFE
Al Porter indulges
Andrew was away working for four nights, so Jenny was shopping for just herself. Not the usual supermarket, though. It was the Whole Foods-type place, with prices to match the pretensions. But the vegetables were so much better than the bog-standard, and when Andrew was away for work, which was pretty regularly, Jenny went vegetarian.
Jenny hit the health-food shop after dropping a small fortune on some ready-cooked quinoa, tofu (both firm and silken), mixed mushrooms, heirloom tomatoes and a couple of aubergines. Andrew hated aubergines. Tonight, Jenny planned a faux cassoulet with cannellini beans.
Andrew was resistant to pulses of any kind. Jenny was also planning to make a black bean and pumpkin chilli. Andrew wouldn’t go near pumpkin. He’d eat a sweet potato, and a bit of butternut squash in a green curry, but he drew the line at pumpkin. “It’s not even Halloween,” he’d say, by way of a joke. As in, you must be joking if you think I’m eating that. It was lovely to eat without commentary or complaints.
Jenny would tear out recipes from magazines of things to make when Andrew was away. She had a special scrapbook for them. Andrew called it the Anti-Storecupboard Compilation, because you never had every single thing in the cupboard. Like, you might have invested in pomegranate molasses last week, but this week we’re all about barley malt syrup.
So that meant more spending, because Jenny didn’t believe in deviation from the recipe; she was too much of a temporary adventurous vegetarian to try that.
The problem with these bursts of modern-day vegetarianism, even Jenny would admit, was that you had to buy all these bits and bobs that you never fully used up. Jenny wasn’t sure how to cobble them together into anything without some Sunday-magazine guidance, so they just sat there, accusingly.
It was an expensive adventure in liberation from your spouse’s preferences. Jenny sometimes admitted as much, after Andrew took a laughing tour through the veg drawer on his return home — as she cooked them fillet steaks from the pretentious supermarket. Andrew always said they were worth every penny.