Taste: My Life through Food(57)

At first I had grand plans for what we might do to pass the time in convivial and entertaining ways. I thought perhaps a rotating schedule of cooks for the nightly meal, followed by movies, games, or Bordeaux-fueled charades by the fire. Things didn’t quite work out that way. Instead, here’s what our typical lockdown day looked like with the absence of our nanny and our weekly cleaning lady.

7:00 a.m. GMT

Within moments of Felicity’s and my awakening, our five-year-old is in our room. It’s not clear how he knows we’re awake. For all we know, he has a monitor like the one we use to listen to his two-year-old sister. He waltzes over to my wife’s side of the bed, completely ignoring me as usual, and begins to chat with her about nothing and everything. (His usual topic is dragons, as he is obsessed with the wonderful book series How to Train Your Dragon and its various cinematic spinoffs.) Felicity and I head to the bathroom and he follows, and perches himself on the bidet to regale us with plot points from the novels and observations about the seemingly endless variety of dragons and their specific attributes. He will carry on this way more or less until sunset.

After dressing, we head to his sister’s room, where she has been “singing” in her crib and perusing the shredded remains of her extensive Peppa Pig book collection. When she sees us enter she inevitably covers her face with a book and pretends to be asleep. She thinks this is funny. She is right. I change her “nappy” and she kicks me in the groin a few times for my trouble.

We all head downstairs for breakfast. For me, this consists of a double espresso, orange juice, and a bowl of cereal with a banana and almond milk. I also choke down a handful of vitamins, including D3, K2, C, B12, curcumin powder, and joint supplements so my knees don’t crack like a melting glacier every time I bend down to pick up a rogue Lego block. Felicity has her tea and the children have either toast, cereal, fruit, the occasional egg, or whatever else their little hearts desire. Most of their food ends up on the floor anyway. This precipitates my first deep-clean of the day.

8:00 a.m. GMT

I tidy up their mess, empty the dishwashers—yes, we have two—scour the counters, wipe down the cabinets and their handles, and organize the contents of the fridge, discarding anything past its due date. I also sweep the floor, but after summoning considerable willpower, I decide to delay the mopping for after lunch.

As you might have gleaned, I am a very tidy person. I actually like to clean, as I find it soothing. But I have gone a bit above and beyond during lockdown. The other day, it occurred to me that I might be able to strap a vacuum to my back like a leaf blower so that it could be with me at all times. Not a good sign.

8:45 a.m. GMT

Felicity and I do an online workout with a friend of ours who is a Pilates teacher. The night before we asked one of the older children to come down this morning and babysit. Seconds before the class begins, the bleary-eyed designee emerges, face still swollen from sleep, and grunts a “Good morning” as we flee to the living room for a fitness-filled escape from reality. During this time I think about what we might cook that evening for eight people yet again.

9:45 a.m. GMT

When the session ends, Felicity and I go over what food items need to be restocked. With four people between the ages of eighteen and twenty, the amount of food, beer, and wine that is consumed is staggering. If there is a shortage of avocados at the local stores, it’s because we’ve eaten them all. If there is no Kerrygold butter left in the UK, it’s because either it’s in our freezer or we ate it. All of it. Just fucking ate it. Probably without even spreading it on anything. I saw a neighbor hungrily eyeing our cat yesterday and it occurred to me that the woman probably hadn’t eaten meat in a week because my gluttonous family devoured all of the beef, lamb, veal, chicken, oxtail, pork, rabbit, and game in southwest London. Still gasping for breath from an unnecessarily grueling workout, I rummage through the fridge.

Given our short supplies, I decide to make something simple tonight: pasta alla Norma and sautéed lamb chops. I reckon that these two dishes should satisfy everyone’s palate and nutritional needs, although I know that my eighteen-year-old daughter will only eat the pasta dish as she is now a vegetarian. What timing.





Pasta alla Norma


— SERVES 4 —

2 large garlic cloves, halved

Extra-virgin olive oil

2 large eggplants, diced

Kosher salt

5 cups marinara sauce

1 pound pasta (rigatoni, ziti, or a thick spaghetti)

A handful of basil, roughly chopped

A handful of grated ricotta salata or Pecorino



In a very large frying pan, fry the garlic in a glug of oil over low heat for about 2 minutes. Add the eggplants, raise the heat to medium, and cook for about 15 minutes, until slightly golden. Salt to taste.

Add the marinara sauce and cook for about 5 minutes more.

Cook the pasta and drain, reserving ? cup of the water.

Stir the reserved pasta water into the pan mixture and sprinkle with the basil. Measure 4 cups of the sauce and put it in a serving bowl. Add the drained pasta to the pan with the remainder of the sauce and gently stir it all together. Sprinkle with grated ricotta salata or Pecorino and serve with the extra sauce on the side.





10:30 a.m. GMT

After doing some homeschooling with the five-year-old, Felicity heads upstairs to shower and begin her remote workday from our bedroom. She is a literary agent and carries out her endless meetings via Zoom. With the exception of finishing voiceover work remotely from my studio for a CNN series I recently completed, I have very little to do these days, as film and TV production have shut down. As far as I know, this has never happened since somebody first called, “Action!” over one hundred years ago.