A question has been going around in my head for a few weeks: is parenting boring? We’re nine months in now and he’s very fun at the moment. The question got into my head from an article in The Atlantic entitled Boredom is the Price We Pay for
Can you ever really be prepared for the arrival of your first child? I think back to those final days before he arrived, and what I wrote in my notebook at the time. The board’s column for kitchen tasks stands empty as granola and roast garlic are ticked. ‘Be
I had an idea – labelled in my head as The Sauce Project – where I would make one new sauce each week, with the best ones entering my regular repertoire. Sauce here would be quite a wide definition: salsas, moles, dressings, the chutneys of South Indian cooking, Thai nam priks would
Our feeding journey over the first six months of our son’s life was completely different to what we had expected and planned for. Each step felt like an escalating challenge, and how we navigated them really shaped us as parents. For all the intentions of co-parenting, there are at
We have started weaning our boy. We initially tried just before he turned six months as he had the sitting up part nailed, was starting to show an interest in our food, and demonstrated an unerring ability to put anything in his mouth. Life in our house revolves around the
We’ve been doing some good entertaining recently. We serve the handrolls featuring the fish I was buying in Tenterhooks. A winter lunch for a big group has a Mexican accent with a big mole thick with mulatto chiles, alongside chicken, arroz verde, black beans and cornbread, with smoked idiazabal
I’ve always loved aperitif hour – as much for the snacks as for the drink. It marks a transition, when daytime tasks end and focus switches to the shared time of the evening. In our first few months of parenting we were in too much fluidity, and often chaos, to
I had a big win last week, but it took me a while before I could enjoy it. I’ve got a food shopping mission which involves heading across town. It’s ‘my’ day with the baby and it should be easy, but he’s been showing an aversion to
8.30am: I’m holding my 14 week-old son in one hand whilst blocking out a plan to cook dinner for friends coming round in the evening. My partner is not feeling well, so is in bed for a second sleep. It is – relatively, for me – a simple menu. Snacks