white_hart

I am currently in the grip of a desperate and hopeless craving for Wagamama. Miso-glazed cod ramen with a side of bang bang cauliflower, for preference, but honestly I'd settle for anything on the menu. It's nearly two years since I last ate there, and actually I can count the number of times I've eaten decent East Asian food (as opposed to bog-standard Chinese takeaway) in that time on the fingers of one hand*.

Sadly, I'm not about to go and eat in a crowded noodle bar, and they don't deliver outside the ring road, so I am not going to be able to satisfy this craving any time soon, and somehow home-cooked alternatives aren't the same.

I've almost forgotten what it was like to be able to plan holidays and actually see people in person, and I don't feel like I miss it that much, but my goodness I miss Wagamama.

*Two sushi deliveries from the person locally who does prebooked deliveries on a Saturday evening most weeks; one takeaway sushi in the rain in swimming friend L's garden; one takeaway sushi in town with friends from Glasgow who were visiting last summer; one lunch from Itsu I treated myself to last term** when similar cravings got too much.

**Maybe on one of my office days next week I could do that again, if I have a day with enough time between meetings to walk into town and back as well as eating.

I managed to get to the office today, after three days working from home, and was so delighted to see my team again I'd almost start to wonder if I was secretly an extrovert if I wasn't so very obviously an introvert. I do like my team a great deal, though, and I also suspect that at the moment working from home just has too many associations with the pandemic for me to enjoy it.

Thursdays are also doughnut day in the cafe in our building. Sadly, by the time I got up there the passionfruit curd doughnuts had sold out (another black mark to chalk up against the "managers' briefing" which actually turned out to be "getting managers to workshop ideas for improving induction", which was not what it was billed as at all, though I probably wouldn't have gone up before 10 anyway), but my vanilla doughnut was very good.

I have also worked out that the way to stop my blue Pietra trousers from looking frumpy is simply to fold the hems up. Somehow, bright blue tapered trousers unrolled feel like scrubs whatever I wear them with, but bright blue tapered trousers rolled look fun and relaxed and cute in a workwear-inspired way. Especially with chunky boots.

So, quite a good day, really. Though I'm conscious that I deliberately put off attempting to formulate a response to the academic who appears to think it's reasonable to ask for "at least 10 hours a week" of support from a half-time employee...

T used to shop for our food most days, which meant that dinners tended to be whatever caught his fancy while he was in the shops. (It also meant that we ate quite a lot of convenience foods, partly because sometimes he didn't feel like doing anything complicated, but also because our local Tesco Metro doesn't really have a great range of things to make interesting meals from scratch, and the big Sainsbury's is a bit of a trek.)

Since the start of lockdown, we've switched to weekly food shops (almost all at the little Tesco, though we've done a couple of click and collect orders at Sainsbury's), topped up with a weekly veg box (initially via a localish coffee shop which had branched out into lockdown groceries, then from Riverford). And this means that we have actually had to plan meals for the week in a way we never used to, and seem to end up spending inordinate amounts of time discussing what we're going to eat. (We are eating better, though, for values of better which involve less convenience food and more vegetarian/vegan/mainly vegetable-based meals.)

After yet another conversation where we decided we should have X, forgetting that we had already discussed this and agreed on Y, I have just bought a small whiteboard to keep in the kitchen and write our week's meal plans on. Maybe this will reduce the number of conversations about what to eat we end up having...

I am making pizza tonight. I've made quite a lot of pizza since cultivating a sourdough starter last spring, and always use the same toppings: tomato sauce, mushrooms, prosciutto, artichoke hearts, anchovies for T, black olives for me and mozzarella. It is a very good pizza (and pretty much what I'd order in a pizza restaurant,though I might skip the ham if it was just for me).

What would you have on your pizza? Would you make something different at home to what you'd have in a restaurant?

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I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want

A surprisingly good day

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May 2025

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