Starting over...
ONE DAY, WHEN MY DAUGHTER IS OLD ENOUGH
to understand the gravitas of it (but not so old that she’ll just roll her eyes at me) I will tell her that when she was three years old the world became a completely different place, almost overnight.
She already coughs into her elbow and reminds me to put on a mask when we leave the house. The other day I overheard her “salitising” her dolls’ hands before they went to the “ballet studio”. These things are a normal part of her life now, while other “normal” things have become strange. I took her into Woolies recently and she was overjoyed by the novelty of it. (I was less overjoyed as she now weighs 20 kg and probably shouldn’t be sitting in a trolley.)
I fetch her from playschool most days and I’m there when she gets home, as my mother was there for me. And every day she asks me the same heart-wrenching question, “Have you finished working momma?”
The worst part is it feels wrong to say heart-wrenching because I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I probably gained more than I lost in 2020. I gained a lot of kilograms, for one. But what I did lose, what we all lost, was time. We lost time with family and friends, downtime for ourselves and time out with our children as the stress of this pandemic infused everything.
And we all lost that separation between work and home, which for all the convenience of being able to schloff to the kitchen for snacks, shop online and order meal kits from our favourite restaurants to support the industry, is not the best way to achieve balance in one’s life – or one’s bank account.
The Jan/Feb issue of TASTE usually looks at food trends, but for 2021 that seems inappropriate. The only food trend that matters right now is how we help to save our restaurants, or how we reinvent them. As a friend said at the start of the crisis, the days of sitting in a restaurant for three hours, being waited on, served a three-course meal and expecting to pay under R300 are over. And so they should be. The restaurant industry is built on passion and insanely hard work – that should be worth more, otherwise why would you sign up for it?
So instead of trends, this issue is about redressing the balance and helping you make better decisions about how to spend your time and money. For me, this means booking time away with my family so I can switch off properly. It means seeing my friends again – in small batches, of course, which is the best way – like artisanal gin and real sourdough.
I want to plan a week’s worth of family meals, spend less and waste less. Yes, I know these are lofty goals – but they are achievable! Abi, our food director, shares some of her fallback weeknight dishes in our new section, Dinner Plans (p 21) and they are exactly the kind of recipes even the most committed Salad Dodger could master. (I see your 30-minute pork belly, p 26, and raise you one Donna Hay no-stir risotto, p 86. Ha!)
I hope to be able to eat out at some of my favourite restaurants and order in from some of my favourite chefs and producers. And I will gladly pay more for this very great privilege. Because I don’t want my child to grow up in a world of fast-food chains and massproduced meals. I want her to be able to eat food that makes her feel happy, not because it’s a novelty, but because that’s what food should do.
The only food trend that matters right is how we save our restaurants”