I have eaten food for well over double the 10,000 hours required, according to the popular theory, to make me an expert. Add to this the time I spend looking at recipes, counting calories, researching restaurants, or gagging at the smell of the bag-spinach filling my hopeless, near-empty fridge, and I should surely by now be on Saturday Kitchen, cooking eggs at speed and flirting with Matt Tebbutt about his holiday-in-Provence tan.
Yet eating is proving impossible to master. Just when I think I’m into my groove, an article tells me that my plates are incorrectly portioned, or the pace of my chews is not mindful enough. I have made some progress, though. I’ve learned that all recipe writers are involved in a conspiracy to lie about “prep” time. And I have made peace with my penchant for the processed foods of my childhood, as well as my love for the flagrantly fancy. (Give me an unnecessary food descriptor – not just cheddar, but cave-aged cheddar – and I will beg you to, please, just take my money.)
I may not have mastered eating, but I’m having a lot of fun trying. Recently, my very, very English boyfriend joined my family at a special sprawling Indian buffet for Eid. As we passed each other in the aisles we’d point out where we’d seen each other’s favourites – lamb chops over there, biryani that way.
“There are some chips over there,” I said to my beloved as he passed. “You’re the third person to say that to me,” he said, chuckling. “Everyone seems very keen to tell the one Englishman where the chips are.”
A buffet is an art all of its own; plate up wrong and you create a Frankenstein meal, a collision of foods that were never meant to be. And so, after too many monstrous mouthfuls, we gave up, retreating to the summer kerbside with bowls of chips, laughing at how we could get a meal so wrong.
