Constant conversations about food, never-ending cooking and baking projects and extra scheduled meals in the day seem to be characterising our household lockdown. I think my dishwasher now dreads the site of me. It’s the most overused member of the household and might be putting in more hours than the TV. Every time I open the door, I imagine it going “For goodness sake!! Leave me alone, let me rest. Stop. Eating.”
Food is the one constant, the thing we need every day. A way to mark the passing of time. I can make a round of sandwiches and chalk that up to a task completed. These tasks are now achievements. Other days, more gets done. We make scones and have a full afternoon tea one day because it’s Wednesday so why not? Waistlines are 2019. Even the wedding tea-set comes out. One week, we have a mid-week roast dinner with all the trimmings. We’ve made our first banana bread of quarantine. In our house, bananas rarely last long enough to go off, which is why we were six weeks in before this freak occurrence and I had to reach for the recipe book. If you put fruit in cake, it’s 50% health food. Fact.
We’ve plundered the depths of the freezer, playing a sort of memory game trying to work out what’s in each tub of leftovers. When will we ever learn to label? Probably never. Menu ‘a la pot luck’ has varying levels of success. The stew we thought we were defrosting turns out to be homemade guacamole. Top tip: it no longer looked green once frozen.
I’ve learnt more about flour than I knew there was to discover. I’ve blindly gone through life using only self-raising and plain, but now discover strong plain flour for bread. We were given a bread maker without instructions and it’s spent years gathering dust on top of kitchen cupboards. I still don’t know how to use it, but track down bread flour and a recipe to make my own, freestyle. It actually works and I feel a sense of achievement. My memory stirs up the ever disappointed expression of my old school home economics teacher, whenever she caught sight of me. This was the single other time in my life I’ve made bread. It was terrible, a dried husk of rock that even my family couldn’t face eating out of politeness, in fact there was just a burst of laughter as I produced it from my school bag and it was left for the birds. They didn’t eat it either. This teacher believed me unteachable, a lost cause, as I welded various sauces to the school stove, broke endless needles in our one sewing lesson and generally did not excel. Well, Mrs Warburton (yes, that really was her name) I’ve finally made my own bread. Maybe I’m not so hopeless after all.
I’ve always resented waste but I feel this has all ramped up to another level since lockdown. Running out of anything, or not using things up completely means the next trip to stand in another queue outside a supermarket will come round quicker. I came across the phrase ‘queue fatigue’ this week, which made me chuckle, but I think sums up the sentiment I’m trying to explain very well. I’m enjoying using the corner shop and local businesses more and there seems to be a trend for other people doing the same as we are now experiencing a national milkman shortage. Until the recruitment drive is completed, I’ve discovered our corner shop, which is still not busy and so usually queue-free, is fully stocked with milk and pretty much every kind of spice or oil you might need for any curry. This together with deliveries of eggs, flour and a veg box from a local cafe means I can put off the supermarket visit a bit longer.
There’s been a lot of support for the local businesses in my patch of the world and small cottage industries are popping up as both current and ex-restauranteurs use their supply chains to sell produce from local farms directly. The most notable is the self-styled “Mrs Chicken’ at “The Hen House’ a few streets away. She adds more stock to her back garden stall each day as the queue winds down the street for freshly baked goods and farm produce. Chefs that have been made redundant start their own businesses, and have their stock added. The queue grows, but I find I don’t mind standing in this one as much. It all tastes like food probably always should have done before we went for mass production. The high street has long been full of small independent restaurants and market stalls and these leapt into action with online deliveries and we have bars offering delivery of cocktails and wine. A Daiquiri or Margherita delivered to the door? Yes, this is probably one of the most middle-class things on offer. I rang home and it turns out local cocktail delivery services aren’t that standard, certainly not in my post-industrial Mancunian hometown. They do have the upsurge in local shopping on the market stalls. Stalls that were hanging on by a thread competing with the supermarkets are now the choice option for locals. These stall holders are more personal, bespoke, offer veg boxes, delivery services, easy collection. They can finely thrive where the bigger shops can’t and it’s so good to hear of life flowing back into the town centre.
I hope that’s the thing that sticks around after all this has gone, the love of local shops and a shunning of the big corporations and a move to putting people before profits. We can all make a difference.
Mummy in pursuit of sleep 
Nice loaf!