The Dinner Diary: Everything I ate for dinner for a month
Plus: It's time to blow a dewberry-scented goodbye kiss to The Body Shop
I love dinner but I also hate dinner. It is the best meal of the day, the time to unwind, chat, and enjoy something a bit more substantial and hopefully delicious. But it’s also a total nuisance that almost every single person I know finds stressful. There’s a joke that a relationship is just two people asking each other what they want for dinner over and over until they die. It’s not surprising that the requirements of cooking dinner nightly features heavily in this week’s must-read essay, ‘The Lure of Divorce’ by Emily Gould. Dinner is relentless.
I love to know how and what other people eat. New York magazine’s The Grub Street Diet is a favourite and I tend to hover too long on those ‘What I Eat In A Day’ videos on Insta. But I care less about breakfast and lunch, those are easy and often repetitive. The stakes are higher for dinner. Like, how much effort do you go to? Do you eat out or order in a lot? Do you meal plan? In my various group chats we’re always discussing what we’re having for dinner and swapping recipes, usually accompanied with, “This is really good and only takes 25 minutes”. Because for weeknights everyone wants that healthy(ish), delightful meal that can be done in half an hour before perhaps taking things up a notch at the weekend. So I decided to keep a totally honest dinner diary in the hope it might spark some inspo, start a discussion, or encourage you to share some favourite recipes or tips (because, as you’ll see, I could definitely use some new ideas to throw into rotation).
A few notes before we get started:
Our toddler goes to bed at 7.30pm so we never eat dinner with him and therefore don’t have to cater to his needs, it’s just my husband, who is American (this is important lol, the chasm in food cultures is great), and myself. Said child also means we don’t get out much.
I do most of the cooking because I enjoy it. Sometimes my husband will say he wants to cook, sometimes I ask him to, sometimes we decide to order in, but if I ever really don’t feel like cooking I generally don’t. I will say that the mental load of ‘What’s for dinner?’ usually falls on me but I think that’s a natural byproduct of doing most of the cooking.
I don’t own any recipe books, I am an internet cook and will share recipes where I can.
If any of the recipes are for big parties, then we usually just cut it down as necessary. Basically I’m not cooking seafood spaghetti for 8 people, even if I’m linking to such a recipe.
I don’t purport to be any type of great chef or expert, I’m just someone overly invested in dinnertime. OK, let’s go!
Sunday 14th January
It’s a Sunday in January in the UK. We’re obviously having a roast, which we’ll eat at about 5pm: lamb, roast potatoes, roast carrots, cauliflower cheese, peas, green beans, gravy and mint jelly (never mint sauce). Maybe I chose to start this diary on a Sunday just to look good. Rest assured it’s all downhill from here. I cook my leg of lamb by blasting it for 30 mins studded with garlic and covered in lemon juice, oregano and salt and pepper before covering it and cooking it really low for another 3 hours, surrounded in a pool of white wine. I don’t use a recipe, it’s just how my mum makes hers and I follow her instructions sent over WhatsApp about five years ago which takes a while to search for. Maybe one day I’ll just write it down.
Monday
Spaghetti puttanesca and a side of roasted broccoli. You’ve heard of TGI Friday, this is CBA Monday and my number one go-to ‘I can’t be arsed to cook dinner’ dinner. Ready in under 20 minutes, including all prep, it also happens to be one of my favourite pasta sauces. I use this recipe from The Guardian’s ‘How to cook the perfect…’ series but I don’t bother with the capers because I don’t care for them and truly believe they are entirely superfluous. My husband had to campaign for a vegetable side dish to accompany our pasta nights for a while. I think it’s an American thing - I find it quite weird - but eventually I caved in to his demands in the hope it might fend off scurvy.
Tuesday
Salmon fillets, roasted broccoli, roasted sweet potato and leftover cauliflower cheese from Sunday. An unorthodox combination perhaps but it works for me. My husband cooks the salmon in butter and oil in the frying pan and I do the sides. As this broccoli dish is going to come up a lot I might as well tell you that I simply throw it in a roasting tin with extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, and a sprinkling of chilli flakes and cook for about 16 minutes (turning over once).
Wednesday
I’m out! Some friends invited me to the opening of a new Japanese restaurant in Knightsbridge called CLAP London so we feast on spicy tuna maki, black cod miso, shiitake salad, shrimp tempura, edamame, and a ton of other stuff I don’t even recognise. It just keeps coming. I will diplomatically say that the food here is delicious and the ambience is exactly what you’d expect of a sushi restaurant located next door to Harrods.
Thursday
Pasta al pomodoro and a side of roasted broccoli. I also do The Guardian’s ‘How to cook the perfect…’ for the pomodoro (thanks Felicity Cloake) and I always freeze half of it. Got this one out of the freezer. Must have been a bit hungover cos two pasta nights by Thursday is quite lazy, even for me.
Friday
Roast chicken, french fries, green beans and gravy. It might look like a roast dinner but I like to think of it as a jazzed up chicken and chips. For my gravy I do a bit of Bisto with the vegetable water from the beans and then add all the leftover meat fat and a smidge of Marmite, which is the way I make gravy regardless of which meat I’m cooking. I keep the Marmite a secret from my husband who is revolted by this divisive British delight and steadfastly refuses to try it. I will know he’s read this newsletter when I hear screams from his study. I’m partial to an oven fry, I never bother making my own, but I insist on the frozen french fries from M&S, which are the closest you’ll get to the real thing. And I’ve tried 'em all.
Saturday
Rigatoni bolognese and store-bought garlic baguette. THREE pastas in one week. I’m kinda impressing myself here. This has to be a weekend job as it takes almost two hours which is nonsense for a weeknight (I’ll also freeze half of this). I always do this BBC Good Food recipe which is really great but I don’t add the bacon because two different types of meat in one dish weirds me out. It all gets a bit Greek mythology.
Sunday 21st January
We go for an early family dinner at Well Street Pizza in Hackney. My 21-month-old son loves pizza and I reckon it’s not long until we’ll have to get him his own one but for now he just shares ours. I have their Napolitana which has been my new favourite pizza for the last year. Anchovies and olives, it’s basically puttanesca on a pizza which bookends my week nicely.
Monday
The Stew aka Alison Roman’s spiced chickpea stew with coconut and turmeric, a recipe so popular that it once created a turmeric shortage in New York. I throw in some king prawns a few minutes before it’s done because I naively think I know better than someone who created an actual spice shortage.
Tuesday
My husband cooks us salmon fried rice from New York Times Cooking. Looking at the recipe I can’t believe it only has a 4 star rating, it is one of my absolute favourites. Tastes better than any fried rice takeout in my opinion. I also can’t believe it says it takes 20 minutes to make because my husband turns it into an event that lasts well over an hour.
Wednesday
Chicken kyivs, mashed potato and roasted broccoli. I once tried to make chicken kyivs from scratch and it was a disaster with every last bit of garlic butter escaping its chickeny parcel so now I file it alongside things that are just better store bought like ice cream or bread (at least my bread). We always get the kyivs from the M&S Gastropub range.
Thursday
We have a friend over and order Thai food on Deliveroo: spring rolls, pad thai, prawn red curry and rice. I don’t really rate the Deliveroo food in my area too highly (not that I’ve tried them all) so the treat really is not cooking rather than the food itself. If you have a favourite place that delivers in Hackney, please do share in the comments, I could use some pointers!
Friday
We have a late lunch at the excellent Clarence Tavern in Stoke Newington and skip dinner so I’m logging this instead. My husband and I share the chicken, leek and bacon pie with buttered greens, which is outstanding. I see I’ve broken my own two-meat rule here but for some reason this doesn’t weird me out as much.
Saturday
Spaghetti carbonara. My husband cooks using this Bon Appetit recipe. I’d love to tell you we shared it from a single bowl in bed à la Heartburn but we actually ate it on the sofa while watching Rushmore, which is probably a once-a-month experience for us (eating dinner in front of the TV, not watching Rushmore).
Sunday 28th January
Roast chicken, roast potatoes, roast carrots, buttered leeks, green beans, gravy and stuffing (I use Paxo sage and onion stuffing mix because I genuinely think it tastes delicious but I know some people will be horrified). My husband still thinks it’s hilarious that we basically eat the equivalent of a Thanksgiving dinner almost every Sunday in the winter but it’s a tradition he’s obviously embraced because he’s human.
Monday
Puttanesca and roasted broccoli again. I hate to be a Real Housewives of Clapton cliché but the anchovies in the puttanesca have to be Ortiz. There is a cafe and bakery near my house which inexplicably sells a tin of these for £4 when the going rate for these bad boys in my neighbourhood is more like £8 so whenever I pass by the cafe I dash in and buy about 6 packs (never anything else) and everyone stands around with their cardamom buns giving me inquisitive looks. I imagine the cafe has given me an unfortunate nickname.
Tuesday
Omelettes with a garlic mushroom, parsley and cheddar filling with homemade sweet potato wedges. Not ashamed to say it wasn’t until my thirties that I properly learned how to make an omelette after I happened upon Wolfgang Puck commandeering a visibly nervous Jon Favreau in Netflix’s The Chef Show and was like, “Ohhh this is how you actually do it”. I mark it as a pivotal moment in my culinary life, if not just my life.
Wednesday
In the spirit of honesty I will admit that this was one of those nights in which you go out and drink red wine with friends and end up grazing on crisps, olives and nuts and sort of forget to have dinner. Oopsie! Not recommended.
Thursday
Turmeric-black pepper chicken with asparagus from New York Times Cooking and egg fried rice. A friend alerted me to the joys of this dish. One of the small conveniences of working from home is I can, though it happens rarely, do a bit of meal prep so I cook the rice at lunchtime to allow it to cool because you must always use cold rice for your egg fried rice, which again is something I probably learned a bit too late.
Friday
Feeling lazy so we Deliveroo a curry: chicken tikka masala, rice, onion bhajis, tarka dal and naan. Nothing turns up after almost two hours and we try to call the restaurant and cancel on the app but we can’t get through to anyone. We’re starving and assume they’ve lost our order so we end up ordering a margarita from Yard Sale. The curry turns up ten minutes after the pizza does. Score?
Saturday
My husband cooks this Bon Appetit seafood spaghetti with mussels and shrimp which is a favourite of ours. When we make this for guests we get the shrimp and mussels from Fin and Flounder fishmonger on Broadway Market but when it’s just us we get the shrimp from the supermarket and forgo the mussels entirely. Both work, this one has range.
Sunday 4th February
Friends come over so it’s a roast again, they’d expect nothing less on a wintry Sunday. Roast lamb, roast potatoes, green beans, cheesy leeks, roasted carrots, gravy and some Yorkshire puddings which I store buy cos they only need 3 minutes to warm up and I don’t have the oven space to cook them fresh for 25 minutes. I really need to learn how to cook roast beef though because we are on a heavy chicken/lamb rotation throughout the winter. I promise to do this by May when Sunday roasts make way for barbecues.
Monday
Puttanesca and a side of broccoli. I’m sorry. I’ve gone for a rigatoni this time to mix things up, if that helps? Somebody put me out of my Monday misery.
Tuesday
My husband is out so it’s girl dinner for me. We used to live near My Neighbours The Dumplings and often went there but since having a child and now rarely eating dinner out together we have come to rely on their frozen dumplings to relive the joy. They are absolutely banging, almost - almost - like the real thing. And far superior to those sad frozen Itsu dumplings. I have some of their chicken and sweetcorn ones and slices of cucumber which I don’t pretend to turn into any kind of the smashed variety.
Wednesday
My husband cooks this great mushroom risotto that is made of arborio, butter, porcini, parmesan, white wine, onion, parsley and chicken stock. I always coo when it’s a really good one but we all know that the stock is really the MVP of a risotto and since I make the stock (always the day after our roasts and then freeze it) I think I should really take credit for when the risotto is particularly delicious. But I let him have it to keep the peace.
Thursday
I’m out with friends at The Marquess Tavern in Canonbury so it’s a classic case of ‘pub grub’. I get the sausage and mash which comes with a side of broccoli (ffs). I make sausage and mash at home quite a bit so I slightly regret my order and think I probably should have just gone for fish and chips.
Friday
I’ve done it again and chosen booze over food. I go to the Connaught bar (No.5 in 2023’s The World’s 50 Best Bars but I have to say the Euro-chill music is criminal) for drinks with friends and we have martinis and I eat a whole bowl of fennel seed taralli and olives (plus the olives in the martinis). I have never liked martinis before and these are sensational so I am beside myself with excitement. I even post about my breakthrough on Instagram. I eat so many taralli that I’m not even hungry when I get home at 10.30pm, soaked in Vermouth.
Saturday
Prawn fried rice by food blogger Khin’s Kitchen. Not sure how I came across this one but when I try something that’s good, I bookmark it in my ‘Recipes’ folder, which is basically my version of a cookbook. Food blogs can be really irritating when you just. Want. To. Get. To. The. Recipe. Khin specialises in ‘fakeaways’ and all her recipes come with a helpful ‘Jump to recipe’ button which means she gets a hallowed spot in my folder.
Thank you for indulging me in my dinner diary! Please feel free to go off in the comments.
And it’s farewell to The Body Shop, thanks for the memories…
If I could pinpoint the exact moment I turned from a child into a tween (a word that was yet to be invented when I myself was one) it was probably the first time I stepped into The Body Shop at the age of 11. I wandered around their fruity-scented store entranced by the colours and packaging, like Charlie arriving at the Chocolate Factory. It was a world of pure imagination. ‘This’, I thought as I applied as many testers as my skin could take, ‘is where you learn how to become a woman’. Development-wise, it was on a par with getting my period for the first time.
After this week’s news that The Body Shop is going into administration, I fondly read many of the obituaries for the usual parties - mango body butter, dewberry perfume - but I also recalled some of the other seemingly-forgotten things that I was obsessed with, such as their badges that said things like “Save The Whales!” and, most notably, their bath pearls that I used to buy one-by-one, like I was in a princess’s sweet shop. I think they were 10p each. There was a dolphin-shaped one, a star, a perfect pink ball. I kept them in a little bowl in my bedroom and daren’t ever use them so they’d usually just end up melting into a perfect iridescent puddle before I ever got a chance to bathe in a liquified turquoise Flipper.
As I grew older, White Musk was used to entice first kisses or mask the smell of first cigarettes. I haven’t been in one for years so The Body Shop and its smells are pure nostalgia. But I have such a soft spot for the place. It allowed for such a more innocent foray into the cynical beauty world than the tweens have today with their Drunk Elephant and Sephora and hyaluronic acid. They would balk at The Body Shop’s banana shampoo and peppermint foot cream. The store’s failing feels a bit like a rejection by today’s girls of my own youth. But I can’t be the only one wishing that, perhaps, they would be a little more interested in animal-shaped bath pearls rather than retinol.
I’m so gutted about the Body Shop, despite not going in one for over a decade. Also read this food diary top to toe and am so impressed by the commitment - the amount of times I just have Cheetos for dinner is shameful
broccoli taking this win in a landslide 🏆