Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For

by Ella Risbridger

It sounds obvious, and it is: food tastes better when you’re hungry. And we have mostly forgotten how to be hungry.

The universal sign of love in an Enid Blyton book is giving away sticky buns or a loaf of bread or a jar of jam like you’ve never heard of coupons: you can tell a nice farmer’s wife from a secret smuggleress by how little she worries about the sugar ration.

The world is so hard, and life is so short: you must make things lovely where you can. You have to make mundane things like packed lunches into something glorious and important and worth having. You have to make ordinary days worth having, is the thing – and investing a bit of time in what you eat and where you eat it (which is really investing a bit of time in looking after yourself) is one of the easiest ways to do it.

Love this!!!

there will always be a time when you want more than toast; there will always come a time when you remember that life had something else in it besides crying.

Woman cannot live by toast alone – and although it might feel, at some points in your life, as though the effort to make anything else might kill you, that will not last.

There will be another feeling. You will wake up one morning and remember other things: the ripe sharp-sweet burst of a good tomato; the kick of a chilli; the salty, meaty bi...

I needed to enjoy the things I could enjoy about being alive, like cooking and eating, and writing about both. And once I’d twigged to that, it was hard to mind being a bit plump.

Don't we all......