What are the items that are almost always in your fridge/ cupboards?
I like this question. I like it even more than the classic “what would your final meal on earth be?”. The things we eat most often say more about us than the meals we would choose for exceptional situations. I’ve always thought a cookbook of leading chef’s go-to, autopilot meals would make a far more fascinating read than the extravagant, impressive dishes they can produce when asked to perform for the camera. The habits and states of mind that shape our baseline diets are probably a better litmus test of who we truly are at any given point in time.
2024 has ended. I’m not going to harp on about how quickly it passed or how strange it feels to pause for introspection once more, but perhaps taking stock of my standard grocery list is a novel place to begin a new year.
So, how have you fed yourself over the last 12 months? Do you feel nourished, or lacking? And if the answer to the latter is yes, how might this be changed?
The end of a year is cool because it reminds us that we don’t have to continue as we are if we don’t want to. Not that self-development is reserved for January only, but it’s helpful to undertake it whilst the rest of the world feels ready for new leaves etc. Safety in numbers and all that. We are collectively given a moment to reflect and decide if we want the next year to feel the same or different to this one. My therapist used to talk about life being a journey through a wilderness, a constant hike through new landscapes. And on that journey, we are carrying a backpack. Going to therapy is a chance to unpack this backpack and decide what we want to put back into it, and what we permit ourselves to leave behind before we continue on the adventure. Now, had he used the grocery list as the metaphor, maybe we would have got somewhere!!!! Kidding, shout out to my doc for making me better than ever. But I do stand by the opinion that how we feed ourselves is a good place to start when it comes to making tangible, measurable, buildable changes to our lives and taking care of ourselves. Sometimes, accomplishing all the things we want to change about ourselves or do or see in a year feels overwhelming. But dinner, I can manage.
I recently started partaking in the weekly writing prompts from this substack and one of the final prompts of last year was “my happy fridge is…”. I extended this to my grocery cupboard. Mine included vegetables, olive oil, hummus and plenty of beans. Plus good quality bread, eggs, and a lot of butter. I know that it requires strong coffee and the odd biscuit. Pasta stores are imperative because, you never know, and jarred anchovies/ tinned tomatoes are good to have on demand. It could probably do with less chocolate and more water. And it hasn’t been interjected enough with cooking for more than one. I would like to change that this year.
Whoever we would like to be, or continue to be, we will need to feed ourselves each day, in all the different ways a human needs to be fed, in order to be them. Meal by meal. Day by day.
May the next one be abundant, good, and nourishing. However that feels for you.