The remainder of April had no other major events. We still had our Friday night fun, but the rest of the time we spent just like everyone else; not doing much.
At that point I hadn’t even been bullied into writing my blog (not for lack of trying), so the productivity levels were at an all-time low (minus work of course which doesn’t count). I was even forced by my company to take a few days of my holiday allowance. I took this very literally and decided to have an ‘indoor staycation’. Instead of spending the week on the beaches of Spain (which was the initial plan), I walked around the flat in a bikini and flipflops, drinking bloody Marys.
One thing I did a lot of was cooking. Those of you who know me, know that I take after my grandmother in that I love cooking almost as much as I love eating. This lockdown has allowed me to release my creative juices and cook/bake/prepare/experiment as much as possible.
At the beginning I had mad levels of energy and I went in all guns blazing. I was baking breads, cakes, crepes and quiches (including the base), making home-made ravioli and gnocchi, and experimenting with stews, casseroles, soups and lots of salads.
note the puzzle in the background 🙂
I made pretty much every Ottolenghi recipe I know three times until I ran out of giant couscous (if you haven’t tried making salad with giant couscous you haven’t lived- see me for recipes).
Now I know that corona is causing many serious problems and I don’t mean to sound like princess Maja with her first world problems, but it has been 9 weeks now that Sainsbury’s hasn’t restocked the giant couscous. 9 weeks?! I am seriously reaching breaking point here. If someone can get me any on some black market, underground couscous smuggling ring, for the love of God put me out of my misery.
Even my trusted Yugi shop in Acton doesn’t have any. And let me tell you they have been absolutely amazing during this lockdown. Not only have they done home delivery from day one (and I don’t even live close to them), but they haven’t run out of anything the whole period. I have been ordering kilos of flour, rice, pasta etc. from them, not to mention the emergency pita, cevapi and Kiki bombone that every Serb needs to get them through a lockdown. Lifesavers. If I knew how to better promote companies on this blog (or I had a readership beyond the single digits) I would. In the meantime, if you live in London and need good produce check them out:
http://shop.magaza-homedelivery.co.uk/
cevapi courtesy of Magaza
The usual high standards do apply to my cooking, although it has unquestionably improved during lockdown. Miguel definitely isn’t complaining. He even suggested at one point that I volunteer myself for the furlough scheme so that I have more time to cook for him during the week (he would also magnanimously volunteer himself to keep me company).
I have, however, become a little bored of having to cook so frequently. Miguel does cook sometimes (although this mainly involves him opening the freezer and switching on the oven) but have just run out of inspiration of what to cook. I now genuinely believe I have cooked every recipe known to man during this period.
I find myself watching MasterChef and fantasising about going to a restaurant. I’ve already told Miguel the first thing I want to do when we’re out is to go to a posh restaurant for dinner and spend loads of money on the most un-home-made looking thing on the menu.
For now I am just cooking stuff in large quantities that we then eat for three days straight for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Or a great tip that I recently discovered is that if you take all your remaining vegetables, cook them and then blitz them together in the Nutribullet you can call that a “potage”.
I got that off my mum. She would make blitzed soups sometimes when we were younger and my dad and I never liked them. I was of the opinion that blitzed food should only be eaten by babies and really old people who can’t chew. I always thought my mum would call them potages just to make them sound exotic and French but I’ve now realised that it really is much easier to just shove everything in the blender. I now serve my wonderful boyfriend a sexy French “potage” for lunch every other day.
Voila le potage
I have to say though I have come out of this with an even more profound respect for our grannies. Having to cook day in and day out when restaurant visits weren’t common, there were no delivery services, and men were even more useless than they are now. Thankfully I love food so much that I always showed the utmost gratitude to everything my granny and my mum cooked for me.
Sadly, neither Miguel nor I are burning off any of this food as we spend 99.9% of the time indoors. We did go for a run together once or twice and I’ve been working out a little more than Miguel who has been totally inactive. He is so used to just naturally being fit without having to do anything about it because of his tennis days (I know, don’t you just hate him). I have been trying to explain to him that he does, however, need to do something to keep his body moving.
One day he needed to urgently take something to Josh who lives 6km away. Public transport was a no no, so he decided to run there and back. This was about week 5/6 and at this point he had probably left the house 3 times to go to Sainsburys in that whole period. I begged him to reconsider running 12km after spending less than 3hours upright over the past month and a half but of course you can’t change a man’s opinion when he’s set on something, least of all Miguel’s.
He did run to Josh’s and back and then he spent the next 4 days sprawling around the house like a disabled person unable to move any muscle in his body without immense pain.
When I eventually forced him to go for a run with me, he gave me the usual warning about us going our separate ways. This is mostly the case, because he runs a lot faster than me, so he leaves me normally after about 1km to run ahead of me. This time, however, he left me after about 1km but turned around and ran back home (I courageously battled through 6km).
I did notice that he was going a bit mad at one point, when I found him playing tennis against himself in the living room wall (of our tiny flat). He had this semi fanatical look about him, so I carefully and gently, without any sudden movements, escorted him to the parking lot outside to play tennis with me. He always says he could beat me with one eye, one arm and one leg (and he could), although I’d like to think that when compared to a 2 meter squared patch of wall I form a mildly more challenging opponent. I’m not sure Miguel would agree.
As lockdown went on, we continued to devise new and fun things to do and create new traditions. One of these was our Sunday night movie “party” night. This is where we watch films in sync with my sister and her girlfriend, and my mum and Salma’s mum join when they can. We then have a ‘post film critique’ via the Houseparty app which is always a lot of fun. This use of two different types of technology is a big challenge for my mum, although 9 weeks later it now only takes her a record 15 minutes to log onto the Netflix party app to join us. Progress.
We initially started a virtual board games night with Steffi every Thursday, but as both Miguel and I are obsessed with board games we also had our own games on the side with family and friends. This kept getting more and more popular and we had so many family members and friends requesting games that at one point we were playing almost every night. Despite this, we still never got bored (bored of the board games…. badum cha!)
One day we even played with Miguel’s best friend in Australia. That was a particular highlight of mine as Miguel partnered with him for a game of Articulate, the game where you have to describe words to your partner so that your partner guesses the word you are describing. It’s usually the case that the better you know your partner, the more successful you are at this game- Miguel and I make an amazing team.
However, Miguel and Rex had a few interesting gems, one was when Miguel described the word “showering” to Rex as “something you always spend at least half an hour doing in the bathroom”, to which Rex answered “pooing”. And my personal favourite was when Miguel described the word “abolishing” as “something you use for slavery”, to which Rex awkwardly started listing off all the torture methods he could think of.
April was a good month, and the novelty of being stuck indoors hadn’t worn off yet, but the 1st of May was around the corner and we all know that’s when the party really gets started 😉