Even food nerds get the blues

DINNER IS MY BEST WEEKDAY MEAL.

I really love the ritual of closing my laptop

(for a bit) and heading to the kitchen with a head full of TASTE inspiration … except on the days that I don’t.

On those days, I curse myself for not planning ahead and putting a braise-worthy cut of meat in the oven at lunchtime, or a pot of ribollita-style chicken-and-barley soup on the day before.

After all these weeks of home-cooked family meals, cooking fatigue has officially started spoiling my dinner.

I have good intentions all day – sometimes I’ve even planned ahead and steamed a whole head of cauliflower, intending to roast it with a precious haul of Jerusalem artichokes and black mushrooms to eat with kimchi-fried rice. I also have a jar of home-made citrus curd made on the weekend and, thanks to Abi’s ingenious idea, I have the waytoo-ambitious-for-midweek plan to make a citrus meringue tart using the chocchip-and-pecan nut cookie dough I bought from Colette at The General Store (p 96).

But then suddenly it’s 5:30 pm and

The Cherub is tired and my brain is Zoomed out and all I can possibly manage is Woolies’ ravioli with the world’s easiest butter-roasted tomato sauce. Which is still cooking, obviously.

So, what do you cook when you love cooking, but just can’t face the kitchen?

It’s the ultimate food-nerd conundrum. What will put the joy back into the evening meal or convince you to break out the baking supplies on the weekend?

Luckily, I’m one of those people who gets unreasonably excited when I spot broad beans in store, so I’m easily inspired to cook when my favourite ingredients are in season. I also love a new find, like the gochujang starter/paste from Sepial’s Kitchen that I used to make that kimchi I mentioned earlier.

And I can always get behind a slowcook, low-effort recipe that yields spectacular results even if it does involve some planning. This is the kind of meal you need to find time to start a few hours before dinner – while procrastinating about writing your editor’s letter for example – so you can slide it out of the oven at 7:30 pm with a magician’s flourish of umami steam. Hannah’s recipes in “Hands-off dinners” (p 16) are like that, as is Karen Dudley’s fall-apart lamb with Vietnamese flavours, (p 86). The only real work here is about 15 minutes of searing, the rest is up to your oven.

I had a birthday recently and I may have had my very small, very immediate family over for a socially distant lunch.

It had been so long since I’d cooked for people that I went entirely overboard. I slow-roasted a shoulder of lamb, smeared two heads of cauliflower in harissa and roasted those too – alongside a tray of sliced brinjals and artichokes that went into a bowl with salsa verde and saltdried capers. I served the lamb on orzo simmered in chicken stock, with a lemony broad bean-and-radish salad.

For dessert, I made Diana Henry’s chocolate-and-olive oil cake with grapefruit ice cream (p 96). And yes, this was over a weekend and, yes, I was so exhausted at the end of it that we ate leftovers and ordered in for days afterwards, but it felt good to be cooking for the joy of it again.

If you love food the way I do, cooking fatigue, when it strikes, can make you properly miserable. It’s how the Salad Dodger felt in those early days of the hard lockdown when he couldn’t cycle outdoors. Fortunately, TASTE is the best possible weapon for these particular blues.

Just when I think I will never look another cake tin in the eye again, I see Abi’s speculaas tipsy cake (p 76) and can’t get it out of my head. In fact, there are at least a dozen recipes in every issue that keep me up at night. So, while I might not make pork ragù with polenta on weekly rotation, it’s on my list for next week, for sure.

What do you do when you love cooking, but just don’t feel like it?”