Читать книгу The Kitchen Diaries - Nigel Slater - Страница 59

Dinner is a couple of tins of Heinz baked beans, tarted up with finely chopped chillies, several shakes of Tabasco and mushroom ketchup, and a tablespoon of black treacle. It will do.

There is no set time for eating in our house, there never has been. One day lunch will be at twelve noon, the next four in the afternoon. Supper can be as early as six and as late as midnight. Neither is our eating always leisurely. Sometimes it is just a question of getting food inside you.

Many is the time supper has been sausage sandwiches all round, either with a jar of mustard on the table, or, if I can be bothered, a pot of wasabi mayonnaise, made by beating the jade green spice-paste from its tube into some commercial mayonnaise. The sausages will be hot and sticky and the mayo shockingly spicy. The general heat is tempered by soft bread cut thick and bottles of cold beer. Other times it may be pepperoni pizzas delivered by bike or sushi or sashimi from town. Just occasionally supper will come out of a bottle.

But there are also occasions when supper is nothing at all. From a health perspective this is probably not to be recommended, but frankly that is sometimes just what I need. A lot of water will pass my lips, but no food.

For the most part, I eat one decent meal a day and then some other stuff. Under which you can file beans on toast, bacon sandwiches, fish-fingers, cheese on toast, more cheese on toast and shop-bought sushi. Sourdough bread dunked into olive oil has been dinner on more than one occasion, as have slices of rye bread with a bit of smoked salmon. Other times I just stand at the fridge eating up the remains of meals past. Cold risotto is quite nice after the initial shock, though not as much fun as cold apple pie.

But I will tell you the best trick for making your bacon sandwich, cold sausage or bit of day-old fridge-rice take on an instant appeal. Have it with a glass of wine, better still a glass of Champagne. Yes, a scavenged supper can be made to sing with pickles or fresh, rough-textured chutney, but nothing works quite as well as a glass of wine.