Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For

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Yes, to be sure, it’s a cookbook — otherwise why would I be writing about it here — but it is also a manual for living and a declaration of hope.

Roasted eggplants are “blistered and blackened and chewy and delectable;” fresh dukkah is “a beautiful sunset orange” that makes every salad “a riot;” soy-marinated eggs are “sticky” with “golden, liquid yolks.We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead. Dinner parties, and Saturday afternoons in the kitchen, and lazy breakfasts, and picnics on the heath; evenings alone with a bowl of soup, or a heavy pot of clams for one.

Come on,’ he said, and we went into the kitchen together, and I made this, late at night, and we ate it at midnight, with wine, and bread, and our fingers, sopping up the garlicky juices from the baking tray, sucking the bones. She cooks Leftovers Pie for her new housemate, because she loves her; Crisis Cardamom Coffee Banana Bread, because everyone made banana bread at the start of lockdown; Turkish Eggs, because Jim would have hated them and he’s no longer there to object. The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice. What I know for sure, however, is that at some point in the immediate and messy aftermath of trying to die, I started thinking about cooking.Premium Digital includes access to our premier business column, Lex, as well as 15 curated newsletters covering key business themes with original, in-depth reporting. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The rice bowl with Vietnamese flavors Risbridger has dubbed Coconut Pow comes out bright and sharp and sweet, although its many parts make it fiddly to put together unless, like Risbridger, you are already in the habit of keeping quick-pickled radishes and salted mango in your fridge.

Perhaps, I thought, lying on the hall floor, I will just stay on the hall floor forever, and sink through the laminate, and into the concrete, and down into the earth. Bouncing up against Risbridger’s prose are Elisa Cunningham’s whimsical watercolor illustrations, which range in elaborateness from two-page-spread tableaux of the neighbor’s cat in Risbridger’s fire escape garden to half a lemon rolling around the bottom margin of a recipe for parsnip purée. Part of the charm of Midnight Chicken was the way Risbridger conjured her lovely life onto the page: a life of quirky, cozy, bookish love with her partner the Tall Man (real name John Underwood) in their Tiny Flat.You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. It was marred only by the tragedy tucked away on the back page in the acknowledgments: In the time between Risbridger handing in her manuscript and Midnight Chicken coming out, Underwood had died of a rare form of lymphoma at age 29. What you’re really reading for here is Risbridger’s sprightly, evocative prose, which is never more compelling than when she’s describing the sheer joy of her food.

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It was very hard, sometimes, but I found something incredibly soothing about running through flavour combinations in my mind; about the neat rows of possibilities with minimal consequences. Vox's journalism is free, because we believe that everyone deserves to understand the world they live in. With her housemate, she invents “the Self-Esteem Finger: you hold up one finger, to indicate a desire that has no reference or recourse to anyone else, and you say ‘self-esteem! It was the first story I ever wrote about food, and it begins with a chicken in a cloth bag hanging on the back of a kitchen chair. Now the only repulsive thing about this drama is the portrayal of young irresponsible couples being encouraged to have kids.