When I am run down emotionally I find preparing food very healing.  I choose the word preparing deliberately. Healthy and healing cooking involves preparation. Preparing the ingredients, the utensils, the table. Preparing the dish as a whole. Preparing yourself first and foremost, your state of mind.

Like most people, I tend to cook incidentally, in other words because of the necessity to eat.  Cooking becomes a means to an end and, as a result, is often sacrificed to the end result, like an inevitable chore. I have to juggle cooking with my all-consuming job, cleaning, tidying up, administration, a small amount of socialising, being married, washing, sleeping, etc. Recently, however, rushing with food preparation had been making me grumpy and dissatisfied. Rushing any act feels like not giving it the due respect or consideration and, therefore, failing to engage with it fully. 

Mindfulness is a word much branded about. You have mindful washing up, mindful dog walking, mindful gardening and mindfulness for its own sake. It’s a word that has always grated on me and I’ve only just understood why.

I don’t mind

Never mind 

Mind your own business

Mind the gap

Mind you do that

Mind how you go

I associate the word mind with dismissiveness or else warnings, caution, wariness, threats.  I once had a colleague who exercised mindfulness so mindfully that she would glance at the clock and say, “I am mindful of the time.”   I wanted to scream.

I prefer the word engage. When you engage with another person, you look into their eyes when you talk, you press your whole palm against theirs when you shake hands with them. You form a bond. This bond is essential even when you are disagreeing with someone. Engaging with someone means acknowledging them, committing to them for that moment, whether it is to like them or fight with them. When you engage with food and its preparation you infuse it with a part of yourself and allow it to seep into you.

I like the idea of committed cooking, of a cuisine engagée.

The Slow Food movement in Northern Italy has a point: to engage with food fully, you need to slow down just as much as it takes. 

As a child I was a naturally very slow eater. Apart from being unable to cope with very hot food in my mouth – which meant that by the time the temperature was sufficiently comfortable for my tongue everyone else was halfway through their meal – I chewed very slowly so was still eating when the others were getting bored, glaring at me, raring to leave the table. After the right amount of ridiculing and telling off, I acquired speed and, as a teenager and an adult, was able to hold my own in the fast lane by swallowing.  At least I stopped driving everyone else crazy.

Now that I’m taking a few weeks off work, cooking has become something not just nourishing but nurturing. A form of self-pampering with results my husband also relishes. Cooking for myself, when I have time, is a delight, but sharing the food I cook with someone who enjoys it is double the joy.

Earlier, I mentioned preparing oneself for cooking. I like to finish whatever I was doing beforehand so that I can concentrate fully. After nearly half a century of excelling at multitasking, I’ve decided that I hate it. Multitasking is not like juggling, where you actually focus on one activity: keeping balls in the air. Multitasking feels like tearing myself to shreds and tossing the pieces around the room haphazardly.

There’s nothing like a mini-ritual to give an activity a sense of occasion. My ritual, before cooking, is to wash my hands – not for reasons of hygiene so much as a way of washing away other concerns and distractions. Then I like to rub my palms together: warm hands feel luckier and more creative.

Given the choice, I prefer cooking from scratch. The same way as I prefer walking or taking a train somewhere rather than flying. It gives me a sense of continuity and progression.  It makes it easier to follow the process of cause and effect. Cooking from scratch is a little like going around the room, picking up the scattered pieces and putting myself back together.

Sometimes, I feel like getting back to basics, to something elementary and elemental. One of my favourite things to make in the kitchen is tomato sauce for pasta. Generally, I throw it together with passata from a bottle and thicken it with tomato purée from a metal tube and add whatever dried herbs I happen to have on the shelf.  But, a couple of times over the summer, I treat us to sugo al pomodoro made with real, fresh tomatoes from the market.  It’s very easy to make but it takes a long time and that’s what I love about it. I just sit at the kitchen table with a book, the week’s New Yorker or my notepad and fountain pen, daydreaming and waiting for the sauce to thicken, listening to it simmering gently for an hour, or two if the tomatoes are watery.  It’s a gentle, bubbling sound, regular and soothing, almost like the song of cicadas on an August afternoon in Rome.  And the slightly sharp fragrance of tomato laced with the earthy bitterness of extra-virgin olive oil, the warm brightness of fresh basil leaves, all brought into harmony under the rule of crushed garlic, is the smell of a cosy home, and a generous table.  It’s better even than the cosy aroma of fresh coffee.

Truly Basic Tomato Sauce for Pasta

This is truly a recipe where less is more, as long as you have good, flavoursome ingredients.  They are (for a generous helping for two people):

❧ 1 kg fresh tomatoes (I buy large cherry tomatoes from our local market: the skins are so delicate that you don’t need to remove them).

❧ 4 small/medium cloves garlic

❧ 1 small bunch fresh basil

❧ Extra-virgin olive oil

❧ Salt & pepper

❧ 1 pinch cayenne pepper or crushed chillies (optional)

❧ Good-quality black or green olives (optional)

Wash the tomatoes.  If the skins are thick, soak the tomatoes in boiling water until it cools, then peel off the skins.  Chop the tomatoes into small pieces.

Peel and crush the garlic cloves and add them to a generous amount of pre-heated olive oil in a large-ish saucepan (that way, when the sauce starts to simmer, most of the red droplets will be confined to the pan instead of bouncing out and dotting your entire cooker top – one hopes!)  When the garlic has turned golden, remove the pan from the heat and let it cool for a couple of minutes.

Add the chopped tomatoes, bring to the boil, turn down the heat and let the sauce simmer until the tomatoes have turned to mush.

Meanwhile, wash the basil, dab it with kitchen paper to absorb excess water and either cut or tear up the leaves before adding them to the simmering tomatoes.

Let the sauce simmer for an hour or two or however long it takes for it to become as thick as you would like it to be on your pasta.  Make sure you give it a stir regularly and be careful it doesn’t burn at the bottom.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

I like to make this sauce one or two days before I need it and keep it in the fridge because I find that this time makes the flavour deeper and richer.

Bring to the boil and simmer gently for a few minutes before serving with spaghetti, grated parmigiano reggiano and, if desired, olives and a tiny pinch of cayenne pepper or chillies.

Enjoy.