I think that’s what it brought out of me, just the desire to look at a half stocked-kitchen and see potential in it rather than just dead ends. In the middle of the pretty intense lockdown, though, you couldn’t just go into a shop willy-nilly you had to be slightly more thoughtful about these things, slightly more creative. I think in some respects, it made me more resourceful and less silly and frivolous and flighty like, I’m very guilty of having some stuff in the fridge or in the cupboards and being like, Oh, I can’t see a meal here, I can’t be bothered to put in the work, so I’m going to go to the shop and get some more stuff to pad it out. It felt really exciting to think hard about what a cookbook could do that might be different from what I’ve done before. It was a really illuminating process, and difficult at times, but also very exciting. It was just: What is the recipe? What are the demands that life places on how we cook these recipes? Even things like going into a supermarket became an ordeal during lockdown, so I was kind of more attuned than usual to the various ways that cooking might become fraught or the various anxieties that might get heaped onto it. I found that process challenging but also quite freeing, because I could really focus on the format of the recipe, not just the kind of ethos or trying to impress people with cooking or anything like that. So it’s a really different way of doing things. I didn’t have that perspective on this one because I was just kind of indoors all the time, basically just cooking for myself. I did the recipe-testing and everything during the first lockdown, and ordinarily, you’d kind of hope that with a cookbook, you’d be testing recipes on friends and getting second opinions and seeing how recipes fit into the rhythms of daily life.
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