I am an adequate cook. By saying that I mean that I am able to function in a kitchen with some basic raw materials. I can usually cobble together something reasonably edible. I make no boasts about being particularly talented or experimental in the kitchen. Before lockdown I had a go-to list of about five dishes I could cook from scratch without referencing a recipe book. That always struck me as sufficient to function as an adult in the world – and allowed a moderately varied diet.

As a single person, cooking can be fairly unrewarding – you don’t want to spend too much effort on a meal that you will consume in ten minutes without a solitary compliment from someone else to reward your ego. Cooking for a large number of people has never been a challenge for me – coming from a family of seven children, I have always been proficient at feeding the masses with the ingredients supplied by my parents. To this day, I still single-handedly cook Christmas dinner for the school of Murphies that assembles in Limerick each December.

Lockdown has changed my culinary narrative somewhat. As all restaurants, theatres, pubs and cinemas have been closed for almost a year, there is no longer anywhere to go in the evening. The evenings can be long. I have an objection to using the delivery apps to bring me food, thanks to how dreadfully the delivery guys are treated and paid by Deliveroo and Ubereats and JustEat. These days I cook at home for myself, seven days a week. Five core meals was no longer sufficiently varied. So I started varying it up somewhat.

For your pleasure here is list of dishes that I had never cooked before lockdown.  This list does not list basic staples of pre-covid life such as spaghetti bolognaise; carbonara; green chicken curry etc. It is new dishes. Also I have of course eaten all the below dishes – simply never prepared them myself. ,This post is sponsored by the Marks and Spencer yellow sticker scheme – whereby I go to the M&S shop across the road for my house each day at 5pm and purchase ‘reduced to clear’ posh, Protestant food for a fraction of the original cost, and then immediately transfer it to the freezer for thawing and consumption at an unspecified future date.

Click link below for the recipes