What To Cook: dinner ideas and recipes, quick and easy cakes, meat and vegetarian dishes
Emotional eating is a new epidemic, officially. After the spurt of jogging, yoga and Joe Wicks’ PE of Lockdown 1.0, subsequent lockdowns (I truly have lost count) have seen us eat too much, drink too much and fall off all sorts of dietary wagons. Apparently quite a few vegetarians have been tucking into chip shop battered sausages and vegans have stopped checking labels for eggs and diary.
I identify with a lot of it, mainly due to the lack of proper motivation to shed weight, like having to squeeze into a party outfit or the perspective of a beach holiday. There’s a reason why you can mostly see just my hands on my YouTube videos.
But I’m struggling and striving and trying not to yield. Window shopping equivalent of emotional eating might help: reading recipes, browsing Instadishes and filling the trolley at online delis never to checkout. The last is an especially great idea I’m going to put into practice a lot now.
And what to cook? The least possible. That’s a joke, there are partners and kids who annoyingly need three meals a day. This week I’m going to skip all the fillers: no pasta, potatoes or rice. I’ll do stir fries: sizzling beef or five spice duck, no rice, just a salad of smashed cucumbers or sesame roasted broccoli on the side. I’ll cook fish and skip potatoes: grilled bream or mackerel; the beauty of serving whole fish is that it takes longer to eat than fillets do. I’ll make leaf wrapped salmon or sea bass with spinach – fish and veg in one pan means less washing up. And I’ll cut down on honey in my breakfast couscous.
Forget about cake, or only read recipes! The lightest possible, if you must bake, will be biscuit de Savoie or the wholemeal sugar-free ricotta cake. Or go for olive and seaweed crackers this week, a savoury baking option. And a bowl of kale crisps, completely unappetising, for a snack. Not feeling guilty about emotional eating is one thing, but borderline obesity quite something to worry about! Keep cooking lean and keep safe!