This Lockdown I Have Been Mostly Eating These Things

During lockdown, I found myself getting strangely interested in cooking new things. Which meant we had some pretty disgusting meals, which I will not talk any further about, and we had some wonderful ones as well.

In the realm of things that could easily have been disgusting but turned out to be delicious was this recipe, which came from a book a Thai person gave me ages ago. I've made it twice now, once using hoi sin sauce instead of oyster sauce, as I didn't have any oyster sauce, once with actual oyster sauce. Both were delicious; both tasted approximately the same. As always I probably added far more garlic and chilli than the recipe demanded. We ate it with steamed Jasmine rice:

In the realm of can anything taste nasty if you scatter it with peanuts or cashews, came this dinner, which was a blend of two recipes from a book of Chinese recipes. I chose it in order to promote solidarity with the people of China, while all the while remaining firmly opposed to its horrible government, which caused me to be in lockdown trying out recipes in the first place:

As you can see, I'm not a person anyone who wants to keep their recipe books clean should lend to.

During lockdown, asparagus appeared in the shop at the bottom of my building (the shop is run by one of my favourite people in the world, although, sadly, she is closing at the end of the year as she is tired; in the meantime, I love the fact that, if my husband goes down there, she tells him what I would buy and what I wouldn't, without any help from me - and she is always right). 

We ate asparagus like this one night; I used a recipe I found on the internet somewhere:

Another night, I copied what some friends had done when we went round to their house once and cooked the asparagus and let it get cold and then ate it with mayonnaise. I made the mayonnaise using a gadget I bought in an Italian motorway stopping station, which involves a glass jar and a lid that has a handle that can go up and down and which, on the bottom of the lid, extends into the jar with a spring on the end of it. The lid has a dip and a tiny hole so that you can pour oil into it and it only goes into the mayonnaise mixture a drop at a time, as it is supposed to. While I made the mayonnaise, I felt nostalgic for the days when we went down Italian motorways and stopped off in motorway stopping stations, (not to mention stopping off overnight at little towns we had never heard of and meandering about, exploring all the many wonders of Europe, sob):

One day, miraculously, fresh tuna appeared at the local market. Normally, you see almost nothing but river fish in Hungary, for obvious geographical reasons. While I should learn to like it, whenever I look at the various freshwater fillets, I think of Queen Marie of Romania's last words, which were, supposedly, "Goodbye, my dear muddy people." Too me, mud and river fish are intimately associated. Anyway, the tuna came from Spain, so I thought I was helping that economy, which I imagine has taken quite a hit from the pandemic. I made a cucumber and tomato and lemon salad to go with it, plus tiny potatoes, boiled, with butter and mint added at the end:

After all that lightness, it was time for duck, with mashed potato and cabbage cooked with bacon, chicken stock, lemon and lots of black pepper. The duck was marinated in orange juice and hoi sin sauce and then the fat side was placed on a cold frying pan and heat turned on underneath until the skin was crisp. It was then put in the oven, along with the fat it had produced, plus slices of apple. I feel hungry just thinking about it:

This, I freely admit, looks fairly disgusting, but it is lasagna and was much nicer than it looks. Just the usual thing of making a white sauce and making what I think one should grandly call 'sugo' (a bolognaise sauce, more or less) and then putting the result together, with parmesan as and when needed. The important thing about this meal was that I grew the salad:

One of my daughters gave me this book a few years ago, and I was a bit sniffy about its garish cover. However, I was wrong, wrong, wrong, as it is very trusty. I have never made a bad meal from its recipes, although, as usual (and especially in lockdown where you had to make do and mend with whatever you had available) I tend to veer from the instructions quite a lot.

This one I think was based on a recipe that might be called grilled yellow Vietnamese chicken, but as you can see I stir fried it, added snow peas since, miraculously, I had some and, as always, left out the sugar in the recipe, because I've never yet found that it made any savoury dish better, and added in lots of chilli, because I've never yet found that it didn't make things better, (well obviously not lasagna or duck, but you get the picture):

I probably used the same recipe with this one, and added the cashew relish, (again no sugar), but minus the cashews, as it turned out my husband had already eaten them.

The sad thing is that my husband spent a short time in the army to help pay for university and developed a taste for reconstituted food. Most of what I cook is lost on him really - what he longs for is a packet, a sachet of dehydrated powder, or stew in a tin.  But he tries to hide this fact from me as best he can.