I am so bored with my diet – well, not bored as such, more ready for a change. Something is coming, looming on the horizon. Storm clouds are gathering in my little kitchen, neighbours are battening down their hatches, a gastronomic revolution is about to shake the foundations of the Fantastic household. Or something. Probably.
Don’t misunderstand me: I eat very well and very healthily. It’s just that I consume the same thing every day. I have forgotten how to be imaginative with food. When Nelson was here at Christmas, you could not keep me away from the stove. Every night of the week, I prepared for him some mouth-watering dish of garlic prawns and roast tomatoes and peppers, my special ratatouille, Moroccan fish tagine, or his favourite: wild mushroom kebabs and rocket salad.
But there is just something slightly insalubrious and unsavoury, I believe, in cooking large and extravagant meals for one when you live alone – so I never bother. The fact remains, however, that, on some lonely nights, my mouth is crying out to have something more exotic and glamorous placed inside it. (Careful . . . Ed.)
I need something more substantial that I can really get my teeth into, as it were. Mangoes, star-fruit, Mediterranean seafood, South American hot sauce, artichoke, sun-ripened Canadian cherries, goats’ cheese from the Loire Valley, colour-themed New York dinner parties with Champagne: mmm . . . the list goes on.
My daily intake of sustenance has become so insipid and predictable: Oatmeal for breakfast, an egg sandwich for lunch, boiled potatoes, sometimes with a soya sausage, followed by a portion of fruit for dinner. For extra excitement on a Sunday, I may open a tin of tuna or have an orange instead of the usual apple.
I’m not complaining – far from it. I appreciate that there are many people in the world today who have nothing or hardly anything to eat, and I feel their pain, I truly do. But, subjectively speaking, I think it’s time my culinary lifestyle took a capricious turn.
The change is bound to be a shock to the system, mind you; but I feel there is no turning back. It is incredibly liberating and exhilarating – but also deeply agonizing – to have such historic decisions to make.
To paraphrase an old adage: I have reached a fork in the road and it cuts like a knife.
{ 3 comments }