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COPYRIGHT
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in the Netherlands by Uitgeverij Podium 2016
First published in Great Britain by HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Copyright © Janneke Vreugdenhil 2017
English translation © Colleen Higgins 2017
Janneke Vreugdenhil asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN 978-0-00-825667-8
Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008256685
Version 2017-11-30
Photographs by Floortje van Essen-Ingen Housz
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
DEDICATION
For me, myself and I
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
7 tips for the solo chef
Your very own golden pantry
QUICK FIX
A kind of pisto Manchego
Spicy lamb pittas with hummus & garlicky yoghurt
Miso soup with noodles, shiitake mushrooms, spinach & an egg
Ridiculously easy spaghetti caprese
Frittata with red onion, baby kale & goat’s cheese
Griddled white tuna with cucumber, avocado & ginger salad
Tagliatelle with prawns & smoky whisky–tomato sauce
Lemon couscous with salmon & cherry tomatoes
Salad of butter beans, tinned tuna & shaved fennel
Good old steak sandwich
SMART COOKING
Baked sweet potato with olives, feta & chilli
Sweet potato soup with coconut & fresh coriander
Soft polenta with mushrooms & spinach
Polenta pizza with blistered cherry tomatoes & anchovies
Mash with baby kale & chorizo
Patatas a lo pobre
Warm lentil salad with grilled goat’s cheese
Spicy lentil soup with yoghurt & rocket
Cod in ginger–tomato sauce with gremolata & rice
Best-ever fried rice
Chinese egg noodles with steak & oyster sauce
Cold noodle salad with cucumber & sashimi salmon
NETFLIX DINNER
Quinotto with fennel, almonds & avocado
Gnocchi with broad beans, brown butter & crispy sage
Quick aubergine & lamb curry with warm naan
Pasta aglio olio my way
Green curry with chicken & peas
Warm salad of baby potatoes & peppered mackerel
Spaghetti with cherry tomatoes, nutmeg & ricotta
Orecchiette with Tenderstem broccoli, anchovies & fennel seed
Courgette soup with tarragon
Bowl of rice with Chinesey vegetables
FREEZE YOUR FAVOURITES
Chilli con everything
All-round chicken soup
Comforting little casseroles
Roasted squash & carrot soup
Pasta sauce with fresh sausage & fennel seed
Pork loin stewed with red wine & bay leaves
Marcella’s sugo
Pesto at your fingertips
Ratatouille
Surinamese masala chicken
Basic nasi goreng (Indonesian fried rice)
CLASSICS FOR ONE
Steak Béarnaise with chips & salad
Sea bass in a salt crust
Cheat’s pizza Margherita
Solo chicken with rosemary & Roseval potatoes
Cassoulet
10-minute pho
Caesar salad with crispy pancetta & avocado
Lamb chops with red wine & thyme sauce & green beans
Steak tartare
Risotto ai funghi
Too-good-to-share cheese fondue
BE SWEET TO YOURSELF
Blackberry mess
Instant mango–coconut ice cream
Lemon mug cake
Warm apple tartlet with vanilla ice cream
Coffee–ricotta parfait
La mousse au chocolat pour toi
Rosemary–honey figs with Gorgonzola
A fantastic raspberry dessert
Pear–yoghurt swirl
Tiramisu for one, please!
SOLO TREATS
Oatmeal congee
Parma ham–Taleggio toastie de luxe
Scrambled eggs, griddled asparagus & salmon on toast
Stir-fried prawns with harissa mayo
Potato gratin with a whole load of cheese
Calf’s liver sans etiquette
Party for one
Oysters, Champagne & a good book
A word of thanks
List of searchable terms
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
The high point
On the kitchen counter are a steak, two lumpy potatoes and a head of lettuce. My evening meal. I slice off a chunk of butter and drop it into the pan. Plop. Turn on the hob, sizzling sounds. The butter bubbles furiously and then, slowly but surely, the foam dies down and a hush descends over the pan. White flakes form on the bottom of the pan. I grip the handle and pour the contents on to a piece of kitchen paper that I’ve placed in a sieve. The glass measuring jug fills with clear yellow liquid. My laptop is on the counter, too, opened out and tuned in to Spotify. My fingertips conjure up the sounds of John Coltrane. I rinse out the pan and pour in a splash of white wine. An equal amount of vinegar. I peel and finely chop a shallot, pluck the pointed leaves from two sprigs of tarragon. I fill a glass with wine, and as I drink from it, I let the liquid in the pan evaporate until there’s no more than a tablespoon and a half left. I peel the potatoes, slice them into thick matchsticks, rinse them under the tap, then dry them in a tea towel. I put a frying pan on the hob, add a splash of oil, then the potatoes and cover with a lid. It’s a mild April day, the promise of summer, and I open the kitchen window. Coltrane blows his My Favorite Things, and I sing along. First softly, then louder. Louder and louder and more off-key. No one can hear me. I’m alone. I’m making myself steak Béarnaise with chips and salad. And then I don’t feel so bad.
I wash and dry the lettuce. Mix together a dressing of mustard, red wine vinegar, olive oil, pepper and salt. Hot and sharp. Probably too hot and too sharp for any guest who might taste it, but just the way I like it. I strain the reduced wine into a bowl. Crack an egg, separate out the white and drop the yolk into the bowl. Rinse out the pan again, fill it with water and bring it to the boil. Place the bowl over the pan. I start to whisk and then very gradually add the clarified butter in a thin stream. My finger glides through the custardy sauce and moves towards my mouth. Mmmm. A squeeze of lemon, a sprinkle of salt, then some chervil and a little more tarragon. Take the lid off the potatoes, turn up the heat. Sputtering oil, sizzling chips. Coarse salt on the steak. Griddle pan on the hob. When the air above the pan begins to quiver, I place the meat on the steel ridges. One minute only – I like it bloody – then the other side. Beautiful black stripes burned into the dark red meat.
Man, do I love Coltrane. While the meat is resting, I hum as I look for my favourite plate, a flea-market find made of white porcelain and decorated with delicate blue blossom sprigs, a dragonfly, a butterfly and birds. I get a napkin from the cabinet, grab some cutlery from the drawer and lay the table. Even though it’s not dark yet, I light a candle. What do I care? This is my party. Dinner for one.
The low point
There I was, in the doorway of my new place, eating cold soup from a plastic container. I’d oiled the wooden floor that day and didn’t have any furniture yet. Well, nothing except the landlord’s brutally ugly leather sofa, to which for reasons that were beyond me he’d grown attached and would come to pick up in a week’s time. Because of the floor, I’d dragged the sofa out on to the roof garden. It was August, and the weather had been sunny for days on end. Carrot soup with ginger, from the refrigerator section of the nearby upmarket foodie supermarket. I was just about to empty the container into a pan to heat it up when I realised that my cooker wasn’t yet connected. Damn. I thought about pouring the soup into a glass, but why? Does it feel less pathetic to drink cold soup from a glass than from a plastic container? If so, would that glass be able to save me from the ominous sensation that my life was a complete failure? ‘Are you taking care of yourself?’ people close to me had asked over these past few months. I was gradually getting scarily thin. How can you eat when you’ve got a knot the size of a beach ball in your stomach? Since my marriage had fallen apart I’d been living on smoothies, bananas and soup. Anything I didn’t have to chew. As long as I didn’t have to cook. I only did the latter on the days I spent with my sons – a sad, monotonous succession of pasta with gloop and rice with gloop. I found it hard to force down even a mouthful.
The soup tasted fine, even cold. Not that this improved my mood, but at least my taste buds noticed. And my mind noticed that my taste buds noticed. I observed that something inside of me was still capable of making observations. And as I sat there in the doorway eating my soup, running circles inside my head, the sky suddenly turned black. Really black. As if Judgement Day were upon us.
A storm of apocalyptic proportions came rolling in over the rooftops of the neighbours at the back, and within a minute it was blowing and raining harder than I’d ever seen it blow and rain during a Dutch summer. Damn – the sofa. I ran out with some plastic sheeting. Pelting rain. Galeforce 3 million. Plastic sheeting fighting back. A four-storey roof garden with no railing. It flashed through my mind that if I fell off now, I would be rid of it all. In the meantime, my body was, luckily, doing its utmost to save both my landlord’s sofa and my own skin.
I sat inside, on the freshly oiled floor. I cried. Pretty hard. With mucus and sobs, the whole works. I didn’t think I would ever stop, but then all of a sudden I did. I stopped crying and started to laugh. Sounds pretty hysterical, I know, but that’s how it was. Then I thought: I’m still alive. Yes, it all sucks big time, and, yes, everything’s down to me from here on out, but I’m still alive.
As I drank down the last drops of the cold carrot soup, I resolved that, first thing the next day, I would go out and buy a hose so I could hook up the cooker. And soup bowls. And a few pans. A cutting board. A knife. If I was going to be on my own, I was at least going to take good care of myself. After all, no one else was going to do it for me.
What I’ve learnt along the way
For more than a year and a half now, I’ve been on my own part time – my sons live with me half of the week, so that bit doesn’t count as alone. The other days I live solo. I put out my own rubbish, replace lightbulbs, top up the boiler, do laundry. And I cook. Do I wish there was someone who would do one of these jobs for me, even if only now and then? Well, sure, sometimes I do.
But more and more often I don’t. It took a while, but I’ve discovered I can live on my own just fine. I have to admit, though, that cooking was the hardest thing of all. For the first nine months my evening meals consisted of supermarket soup, bags of crisps, toasties, fried eggs, mayonnaise, avocado and anchovy sandwiches (which are delicious, by the way!), Indonesian takeaway from the shop around the corner and sometimes just a bowl of oatmeal. Thank god, friends would invite me over from time to time and lovingly feed me healthy home-cooked meals. Then, slowly but surely, as the rawest of my grief over my broken marriage began to recede, my interest in food returned, and with it my enjoyment of cooking. I no longer bought ready-made soups but made them myself. I cooked rice and stir-fried vegetables that I flavoured with ginger, chilli and soy sauce. I sautéed a piece of salmon or fried a steak and ate this with a salad. I cooked spaghetti and made a sport out of getting the sauce ready in exactly the same amount of time as it took to boil the pasta. I ate fewer meals in bed, staring at my laptop, or sprawled on the sofa in front of the television, and more of them sitting at a proper table. I started to stock my new kitchen with a decent supply of basic ingredients so that on busy days, when I came home late, I could still throw together a quick meal. And I started to have fun with it. ‘Check me out!’ I would say to myself as I sat there all on my lonesome, digging into a delicious plate of risotto. Candles, music, glass of wine. There in the kitchen, during the second half of those first eighteen months following my divorce, I learnt to take care of myself again. I was used to cooking for other people – for my husband, my children, my relatives and my friends – crikey, sometimes I even cooked for the entire street. Cooking was my way of giving pleasure to others, and now I was learning that I deserved that kind of pleasure too. Now I know that cooking for yourself is nothing less than an exercise in loving yourself.
Solo is the new togetherness
More and more people are living solo. Young people, old people, people of all ages. Like me, some of them are divorced; others are widows or widowers, or simply haven’t yet found the love of their life. Whatever the reason, more and more people are consciously choosing to live on their own. According to Statistics Netherlands, there are currently more than 3.3 million one-person households. This number is only expected to increase in the decades to come. So, singles are on the rise, and not just in the Netherlands. In Britain the number of people living alone doubled in a generation. More than half of all North Americans are single – that’s nearly two and a half times more than in the 1950s. This kind of demographic shift will inevitably have far-reaching economic, political, sociological and cultural consequences.
Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the statistics, what I’m concerned with here are the culinary consequences; all those singles who – maybe not every night, but very often – are tucking into their grub on their own. So what does this look like? There’s a persistent, clichéd image out there of the single man or woman sitting slouched in front of the television and shovelling down microwave meals night after night. Or worse yet, eating leftover baked beans straight from the tin by the cold light of the fridge. When I asked around among my single friends, I was relieved to find that things weren’t quite so bad. People in single households actually do cook, but almost everyone also admitted that they found it hard to keep their solo meals somewhat interesting, healthy and varied.
Although my little survey may have been totally random and unscientific, the findings are consistent with bona-fide research. On the whole, the meals of people who eat alone are less nutritious than those eaten by people who share their table with others. Singles generally have a more limited diet and eat less fruit, vegetables and fish. These facts are quite disheartening. Statistics also show that singles throw away more food than families. This isn’t so strange when you consider that supermarkets still focus mainly on families, with most pre-packaged products intended to serve two to four. So, many of those who eat alone are often obliged to eat the same thing two days in a row. Which is, of course, fine now and then, but does not exactly contribute to the enjoyment of a meal. At the same time, there are hardly any one-person recipes in cookbooks, magazines and newspapers or on cooking blogs and websites.
Cooking for one really does require a different approach from cooking for a family or an entire army and is not simply a matter of quartering a recipe meant for four. Solo cooking requires an approach that is both smarter and simpler. The challenge is to make a proper meal using just a few ingredients (because you want to throw away as little as possible) and not spend too much time doing it (because you don’t want to spend an hour in the kitchen every day making something that will take 10 minutes to eat).
Now that solo seems to be the new togetherness, I feel it’s high time to finally take the single cook a bit more seriously. Whether you’re alone by choice or by chance, whether you eat alone every night or just now and then, I hope this book will help you discover that cooking for yourself can be very satisfying. Perhaps precisely because it’s just you. You’re essentially your own ideal guest – you know exactly what this person likes to eat.
7 TIPS FOR THE SOLO CHEF
1. DISCOVER WHAT YOU LIKE TO EAT AND AIM TO PLEASE YOUR OWN PALATE. One of the most wonderful things about cooking for yourself is that you don’t have to take anyone else into account. It doesn’t matter what you make as long as it sounds good to you.
2. EXPERIMENT! See cooking for yourself as a chance to try new things. Even if what you come up with turns out to be inedible, there’s no harm done. That’s why they deliver pizzas.
3. STOCK YOUR VERY OWN GOLDEN PANTRY. Cooking for yourself also means you have to do your own shopping, and it’s nice if you don’t have to leap that hurdle on busy days. Here you’ll find a list of food items that are good to always have on hand.
4. CUT YOURSELF SOME SLACK. There’s nothing wrong with beans from a tin, mayo from a jar, lettuce from a bag or hummus from the refrigerator section of the supermarket. You really don’t need to make everything from scratch.
5. EMBRACE THE ONE-POT MEAL. Cooking for yourself also means you have to do your own washing up …
6. CHERISH THE EGG. Fried, boiled or scrambled, you can whip up something nourishing in less than 10 minutes. You never have to go hungry if you have eggs in the house.
7. DON’T GO TOO SOLO! Invite friends over for dinner as often as you can. Cooking for yourself is good, and pleasurable, and cool, but I still don’t believe that we were meant to eat alone.
YOUR VERY OWN GOLDEN PANTRY
coarse + fine sea salt
black peppercorns
dried herbs + ground spices (in particular thyme, oregano, bay leaves, cumin, coriander, chilli flakes + curry powders)
olive oil + rice or peanut oil
red wine vinegar, white wine vinegar + balsamic vinegar
Dijon mustard
harissa or sambal (Indonesian chilli sauce)
soy sauce
fish sauce
stock cubes and/or stock pots
Thai and/or Indian curry paste
pasta
basmati or jasmine rice + risotto rice
tins or jars of beans, chickpeas and/or lentils
tinned coconut milk
instant couscous and/or bulgur and/or quinoa
instant polenta (if you like polenta – some people hate it)
tins of peeled tomatoes
tinned tuna + anchovies (+ sardines, if you like)
olives in jars or tins
capers, packed in salt or vinegar
nuts (if you freeze them, they’ll stay fresh longer)
peanut butter (so you can always make a peanut butter and sambal sandwich)
onions + garlic
eggs
lemons and/or limes
fresh root ginger (you can also cut this into pieces and freeze)
fresh chilli pepper (at least, if you’re a chilli-head like me)
butter
yoghurt
Parmesan cheese (can also be frozen, grated or otherwise)
bread
pitta bread and/or tortillas and/or naan (all three can also be used as a base for pizza)
frozen peas and/or spinach
at least 1 portion of meat, chicken or fish
QUICK FIX
Say you come home hungry and tired after a long day at work – cooking yourself anything more than a simple meal would be a challenge, right? To put it mildly. On a night like that all you want to do is kick off your shoes, pour yourself a glass of something and get a plate of food in front of you as quickly as you can. Enter the refrigerated supermarket ready meal. Enter the takeaway.
But the thing with those meals is that they get awfully boring after a while. And do you know why? Because they’re prepared by someone who doesn’t know you. Someone who doesn’t know how hot you like your curry, how salty you like your soup, how velvety you like your mash or how al dente you like your pasta. They’re made for the average palate. They haven’t been created with unique little you in mind. Which is why a home-cooked meal, no matter how simple, is always more satisfying than an anonymous one. The good news is that it’s not that hard to throw something together in 15 minutes – 20 minutes tops. Something that tastes much better and is far more enjoyable …
Cooking for yourself is a chance to figure out what pleases your palate. Or, to paraphrase Nicolas Cage in Wild at Heart, see it as a symbol of your individuality and your belief in personal freedom.