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i TUESDAY 16 JANUARY 2018
35
Tuesday
Food
On your own? Cooking for yourself is worth the trouble, cookery writer Janneke Vreugdenhil tells Ella Walker
All the single ladles
E
ating alone? Often it seems easier to chuck something on a slice of toast when dining solo than to go to the effort of cooking a proper meal. For Janneke Vreugdenhil, her toast topping of choice was anchovies and avocado – if she could bring herself to eat at all. “After my husband left me three years ago, at first, I couldn’t eat,” she recalls. “I’m a food writer so I’m used to cooking, food is a big part of my life. “I get up in the morning and I think about food; I go to bed and I think about food, and suddenly, food was the last thing on my agenda. “I was so sad, I wasn’t hungry. I was losing weight and I felt miserable. Because divorce is not good for your selfconfidence, I didn’t love myself enough to think I was worth the trouble of cooking. “Then one day, I thought: ‘OK, I have to start taking better care of myself’.” It was after around six months of living alone – aside from when her two sons were with her – that the Dutch cookery book author and critic finally seared herself a lone wolf of a steak.
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“In the beginning, it felt really strange,” she says. “I thought: ‘It’s silly, I’m all alone, why am I going to all this trouble? Why don’t I just eat a bag of crisps in bed like I did in the first months’?” That process of swapping dinners of crisps, supermarket soup and bowls of oatmeal led to her rediscovering her joy of food, and to recipe ideas, and finally to Solo Food, a cookbook of dishes perfect for one. She considers the book her “therapy” because it drove her to cook for herself daily, and enjoy it, until “it became a new normal thing to do”. “After a while, I didn’t eat dinner in front of the television. I decided to sit at the table and properly eat my food with a knife and fork and have a glass of wine with it,” she says with pride. Vreugdenhil’s own sadness and wobbly selfesteem were not the only obstacles to cooking well for one, though. “Cooking for one is a different thing than cooking for two, or a crowd or a family,” she says. “Recipes are always meant for four people, and packaging in supermarkets is aimed at families.
“It is far easier to multiply a recipe for one, than to divide a recipe for four into one-person portions – like a cauliflower, you’re never going to eat a whole cauliflower all by yourself. “Meals have to be quick and practical. You have to be clever.” In Solo Food, she shares a lemon cake in a mug, a bowl of stir-fried prawns to dunk in harissa mayonnaise, ideas
Janneke Vreugdenhil wrote ‘Solo Food’ as a form of therapy
for using up stuff across multiple days without rice-fatigue setting in, and a favourite green slush of quinotto – a dish that the author admits is “not something I would make for someone else, it doesn’t really look good, it’s a bit messy, but it tastes really, really nice”. And, perhaps most brilliantly, Vreugdenhil has stuck in a recipe for
“oysters, Champagne and a good book”. “So many people live solo for some time in their lives,” she says. “Whether you’re alone by choice or by chance, it doesn’t matter, cooking for yourself is a very precious – and fun – thing to do.” ‘Solo Food’ by Janneke Vreugdenhil (£16.99, HQ) is out now
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