Things to eat when it’s too cold to leave your house (slaws, soups, beans, sweet pots)

I’m a sun-hungry millennial; of course I’m sat outside in 0° weather!

I’ve elected to write this newsletter – a day late, I know – outside my favourite grocery store. It’s hovering around 1° but the sky is faultlessly blue. Earlier today I cycled to a cafe that I believed would be bathed in sunlight only to discover that my meteorological assumptions were based on its summer schedule, not the whims of this January exposure. Instead I found a park bench that was sun-drenched, wrote two pages in my journal about the same boring things I always do (who am I? Where do I want to live? What do I want to do? What am I going to eat tonight?) and returned on the bike frozen but happy.

The issue as I see it is that I eat a lot of the same meals because I’m on a slight budget and I am just one woman: being alone in the kitchen and in life means using up a bag of kale and a packet of smoked mackerel over four days. As a result my recipe brain is a frozen tundra. The cold has forced me to retreat to the same old dishes, which are neither new nor particularly interesting.

But seeing as my main ambition in life is to make everything I do feel sensational and romantic (even if my cold dead heart beats slowly on the inside), I thought I’d round up what I consider to be easy cupboard staple / fridge leftovers recipes to banish the cold.

Of course this might mean you will want to buy new ingredients (we can’t always dismantle the capitalist manifesto!) but I also encourage you to find alternatives in your pantry because it’s simply too cold to pop out just for miso.

Disclaimer: my mum made this aioli and chicken Milanese. If I hadn’t returned home with these treats I would have eaten my slaw with fish fingers.