Solo Food. Janneke Vreugdenhil

Surinamese masala chicken

       Basic nasi goreng (Indonesian fried rice)

       CLASSICS FOR ONE

       Steak Béarnaise with chips & salad

       Sea bass in a salt crust

       Cheat’s pizza Margherita

       Solo chicken with rosemary & Roseval potatoes

       Cassoulet

       10-minute pho

       Caesar salad with crispy pancetta & avocado

       Lamb chops with red wine & thyme sauce & green beans

       Steak tartare

       Risotto ai funghi

       Too-good-to-share cheese fondue

       BE SWEET TO YOURSELF

       Blackberry mess

       Instant mango–coconut ice cream

       Lemon mug cake

       Warm apple tartlet with vanilla ice cream

       Coffee–ricotta parfait

       La mousse au chocolat pour toi

       Rosemary–honey figs with Gorgonzola

       A fantastic raspberry dessert

       Pear–yoghurt swirl

       Tiramisu for one, please!

       SOLO TREATS

       Oatmeal congee

       Parma ham–Taleggio toastie de luxe

       Scrambled eggs, griddled asparagus & salmon on toast

       Stir-fried prawns with harissa mayo

       Potato gratin with a whole load of cheese

       Calf’s liver sans etiquette

       Party for one

       Oysters, Champagne & a good book

       A word of thanks

       List of searchable terms

       About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

      The high point

      On the kitchen counter are a steak, two lumpy potatoes and a head of lettuce. My evening meal. I slice off a chunk of butter and drop it into the pan. Plop. Turn on the hob, sizzling sounds. The butter bubbles furiously and then, slowly but surely, the foam dies down and a hush descends over the pan. White flakes form on the bottom of the pan. I grip the handle and pour the contents on to a piece of kitchen paper that I’ve placed in a sieve. The glass measuring jug fills with clear yellow liquid. My laptop is on the counter, too, opened out and tuned in to Spotify. My fingertips conjure up the sounds of John Coltrane. I rinse out the pan and pour in a splash of white wine. An equal amount of vinegar. I peel and finely chop a shallot, pluck the pointed leaves from two sprigs of tarragon. I fill a glass with wine, and as I drink from it, I let the liquid in the pan evaporate until there’s no more than a tablespoon and a half left. I peel the potatoes, slice them into thick matchsticks, rinse them under the tap, then dry them in a tea towel. I put a frying pan on the hob, add a splash of oil, then the potatoes and cover with a lid. It’s a mild April day, the promise of summer, and I open the kitchen window. Coltrane blows his My Favorite Things, and I sing along. First softly, then louder. Louder and louder and more off-key. No one can hear me. I’m alone. I’m making myself steak Béarnaise with chips and salad. And then I don’t feel so bad.

      I wash and dry the lettuce. Mix together a dressing of mustard, red wine vinegar, olive oil, pepper and salt. Hot and sharp. Probably too hot and too sharp for any guest who might taste it, but just the way I like it. I strain the reduced wine into a bowl. Crack an egg, separate out the white and drop the yolk into the bowl. Rinse out the pan again, fill it with water and bring it to the boil. Place the bowl over the pan. I start to whisk and then very gradually add the clarified butter in a thin stream. My finger glides through the custardy sauce and moves towards my mouth. Mmmm. A squeeze of lemon, a sprinkle of salt, then some chervil and a little more tarragon. Take the lid off the potatoes, turn up the heat. Sputtering oil, sizzling chips. Coarse salt on the steak. Griddle pan on the hob. When the air above the pan begins to quiver, I place the meat on the steel ridges. One minute only – I like it bloody – then the other side. Beautiful black stripes burned into the dark red meat.

      Man, do I love Coltrane. While the meat is resting, I hum as I look for my favourite plate, a flea-market find made of white porcelain and decorated with delicate blue blossom sprigs, a dragonfly, a butterfly and birds. I get a napkin from the cabinet, grab some cutlery from the drawer and lay the table. Even though it’s not dark yet, I light a candle. What do I care? This is my party. Dinner for one.

      The low point

      There I was, in the doorway of my new place, eating cold soup from a plastic container. I’d oiled the wooden floor that day and didn’t have any furniture yet. Well, nothing except the landlord’s brutally ugly leather sofa, to which for reasons that were beyond me he’d grown attached and would come to pick up in a week’s time. Because of the floor, I’d dragged the sofa out on to the roof garden. It was August, and the weather had been sunny for days on end. Carrot soup with ginger, from the refrigerator section of the nearby upmarket foodie supermarket. I was just about to empty the container into a pan to heat it up when I realised that my cooker wasn’t yet connected. Damn. I thought about pouring the soup into a glass, but why? Does it feel less pathetic to drink cold soup from a glass than from a plastic container? If so, would that glass be able to save me from the ominous sensation that my life was a complete failure? ‘Are you taking care of yourself?’ people close to me had asked over these past few months. I was gradually getting scarily thin. How can you eat when you’ve got a knot the size of a beach ball in your stomach? Since my marriage had fallen apart I’d been living on smoothies, bananas and soup. Anything I didn’t have to chew. As long as I didn’t have to cook. I only did the latter on the days I spent with my sons – a sad, monotonous succession of pasta with gloop and rice with gloop. I found it hard to force down even a mouthful.

      The soup tasted fine, even cold. Not that this improved my mood, but at least my taste buds noticed. And my mind noticed that my taste buds noticed. I observed that something inside of me was still capable of making observations. And as I sat there in the doorway eating my soup, running circles inside my head, the sky suddenly turned black. Really black. As if Judgement Day were upon us.

      A storm of apocalyptic proportions came rolling in over the rooftops of the neighbours at the back, and within a minute it was blowing and raining harder than I’d ever seen it blow and rain during a Dutch summer. Damn – the sofa. I ran out with some plastic sheeting. Pelting rain. Galeforce 3 million. Plastic sheeting fighting back. A four-storey roof garden with no railing. It flashed through my mind that if I fell off now, I would be rid of it all. In the meantime, my body was, luckily, doing its utmost to save both my landlord’s sofa and my own skin.

      I sat inside, on the freshly oiled floor. I cried. Pretty hard. With mucus and sobs, the whole works. I didn’t think I would ever stop, but then all of a sudden I did. I stopped crying and started to laugh. Sounds pretty hysterical, I know, but that’s how it was. Then I thought: I’m still alive. Yes, it all sucks big time, and, yes, everything’s down to me from here on out,