Sweet Home Al(one)abama

Cooking for one has become an exquisite art to balance the quality and quantity of food that is going to be in your plate. It’s about that eternal dilemma of how much is for one person, what one should do to satisfy our own necessities, how much time I want to spend in the kitchen (preparing, cooking and cleaning).

What’s the best part of the day?
The moment you decide to get up from the sofa and walk to the fridge, during those seconds that you arrive there, hoping for all your week food be ready. Once you open that door, you can only see either desolation and that sad cucumber you decided not to eat.

Who you gonna call?

Sadly they can’t solve that problem in this world! You decide to apply your plan B and call your next superhero: The delivery person!

It’s Sunday night and you ordered a pizza, your bell rings and your hero places in your hand a sacred totem of dough and tomato sauce. Then you realize, you never exchange more words than “-it’s 46 Kunas -here you go, thank you! – Thank you and dobar tek!”, you have a nickname for each one of them and they either have a weird or a cool nickname for you or last weekend you went out for a beer, you recognize the delivery person and you don’t know whether to say hello or ran away from the awkward moment.

Monday morning, you wake up and realize you know all the delivery guys of the neighbourhood. Your life has been a vicious loop of fast food and junk food orgies and you can’t anymore! It’s time to break free and start a life where you control what you eat when you eat and your pocket appreciates the effort!

You delete all the food delivery apps, throw to the recycling paper bin all the fast food flyers and decide that after work, you will pass by the supermarket and buy fresh vegetables, olive oil, rice and pasta, milk/vegetable source drinks, eggs and fresh meat (for non vegetarians/vegans), some canned food (let’s admit it, for those lazy days), some spices although you don’t know where to put them, curry (curry?)

Your motivation is higher than the empire state and you can’t wait to go home, chop those vegetables like jack the reaper, stir and fry like Master ChiFu from the Tai restaurant, grill that stake like “Rostilj in prvi Maj” at Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant. You invest two, three or four hours in the kitchen, almost performing alchemy

You are proud of the result but the first spoon brings you memories of childhood when you wanted to prepare breakfast for your parents and they nodded with sweet and sour faces and you understood the taste of a bitter victory. You eat it all because you made it, you lie to yourself defining it “not bad”, “those burnt notes add a special touch”, “it’s salty as the sea, but the plate needs it”. Deep down you wonder “All those hours for this? Really?”

It is midnight, the after taste of your dinner is still in your mouth and your stomach, complaining about what you put in there. Desperate as you can be, comparing that blub with your mom’s simplest dish, you decide to quit and download again the delivery apps, in an attempt to forget that flavour and see a friendly face, your hero.

Better to sleep it over and start fresh a new day!

Sergio Varela