Changes to the Recipe

Changes to the Recipe (Growing up) (8th June 2008, 3.40pm)

I wish that I could separate out the ingredients. Every single one I added, cooking like living, living like cooking, without weights or measurements - no teaspoons or lines to keep within for me - simply a dash here, a sprinkle there, a gloop of this, a smidgen of that. And if you chuck in too much, distracted out of the moment by a gale of laughter prompted by the radio, being poured another glass of wine (usually by your own bad influence), the dog chasing a duck down the pontoon outside in a rush of scrattering claws on metal and the flutter-splash-squawked indignation and a cacophony of excited terrier barks; before you know it, you’ve forgotten you’re pouring white wine vinegar or shaking Worcester sauce and then you have to fiddle the whole thing back to an equilibrium of flavours, sprinkle, sprinkle, diddle-dash, glop-floop, hiss, suck on teaspoon, grimace, reshake, squidge, retaste, ace, and all that.

My life is a bowl of homemade chilli; personalised recipe, too much garlic and some mushrooms because I had them and just thought ‘sod-it’. Calmed the chilli too much. That’s what I’ve done, you see, I’ve added bloody mushrooms and now the flavours are screwed up but everybody’s mmm-ing and jealous that you can cook without really thinking and you’re just a bit bored by it. The trouble is, you can’t just fish them out again, one by one; once added, those ingredients stay with you and you just have to readjust the rest to accommodate them.

I haven’t got any rice. Or nachos. Or pasta, even. Only that squidgy rice-flour and maize-flour based stuff I bought three months ago when I was convinced I might have celiac disease. By the time I’d actually talked the doctor into a blood test, it was too late; I’d given away anything with even a sniff of wheat in it and cured myself of a cheese addiction nurtured through two and a half decades. Some people might think it odd that I would think of trying to serve chilli on pasta but then I got bored of rice a few years ago and tried it and from then on refused to stick to clichés. It’s healthy to experiment. To a point. So it’s just the soggy fake pasta that was too floppy and disgusting to eat twice but since I can never bear to throw anything out, there it sits, taking up precious space in my limited collection of cupboards and gloriously unreplaced because I’ve lost the taste for the real thing.

You’re sitting with your back to me, as usual. Fiddling with the computer and scoffing chocolate biscuits at the rate of one a minute, insisting that you cannot possibly wait twenty minutes and that of course there’ll be room for dinner. You push your rice-free chilli around your plate. I borrowed some white sliced bread from the neighbours for you to dip in it, but you haven’t eaten that either. Football Manager is obviously too demanding. I hallucinate Beckham clutching a packet of chocolate biscuits as he lies on the ground tantruming during Euro ’96 and realise that twelve years ago is actually quite far off, now.

The distance between us is only ever a few feet. Feet that march, growing into yards of uneaten dinners and unpaid bills, my tears, and your insistence upon disallowing every attempt of mine to moan about my imperfect days. Overlooking your own home goals. Gone are the days of university; now it’s early bed and homemaking, getting up for work. I must contain my partying to weekends, and be sensible. The hardest thing is your refusal to grow up with me. You say you miss me. I am struggling under the weight of soggy pasta and, as I resolutely share the rest of your plate between myself and a greedy small dog, I wonder what to do with it. Wiping chilli sauce off a white patch of wagging fur with a used piece of kitchen roll, I muse that the mushrooms were really a bad idea. Blandness and a lack of spiciness. No undoing it now, though.

Perhaps I could use it for something other than eating. I could donate it to the Art department at school; I vaguely recall making a mess with uncooked dried pasta and liquid glue, coming home with a piece stuck to the back of my skirt, sat on without realising, my best friend rather overenthusiastic with tube squeezing. She’s a doctor now and the transferral is terrifying. Only the potential reactions of the Art department staff to such a brilliant plan stop me, and force my hand. I remove it from its large, comfortable existence in my small, squashed cupboard and, with no more than one wince, place foot on bin pedal, wait for lid to lift, and then chuck the packet in.

As the lid slaps back down, the pasta weight falls from me. No amount of bland mushroomy aftertaste can ruin the joy I feel as I rearrange my little cupboards, ever hopeful that one day, I will open a door and not have a roll of cling film or a jar of marmite or a bag of rice or a box of coconut cream sachets land on my toes; one day, I may well be able to regain barefoot status in my own home. The marmite bruise took weeks to fade.

Getting rid of you is not so easy; you will not fit in my tiny kitchen bin. You have occupied my space, carving out a large, comfortable existence in a world that now finds you extraneous. Fatly typing at your keyboard, clickety-click mousey-mousey, another prized footballer for your stable, the empty packet of chocolate biscuits lying, oddly deflated, beside your coffee-mug hand, you have no idea. I have realised that your presence is in fact like the mushrooms: the jarring ingredient. If I can fish you out, then the spiciness might well return. I’m not sure that the Art department would want you either: as a still life model, you would scare the students. I think that first, I will let you eat the rest of the bland chilli. Two more meals. Yellow card, red card. You have outgrown your welcome, and I no longer want to play with you. I’ll bring it up next weekend, while you’re watching Liverpool.