I am a foodie’s wife, and live in a house where everything is made from scratch. Everything. Stock is brewed like a science experiment. Tomatoes are slow-roasted, peeled, and blitzed into velvety sauces. Even the breadcrumbs are homemade—because apparently, there are kinds of breadcrumbs, and using the wrong one is basically culinary sabotage.
A simple weekend lunch? Not a chance. The soup alone takes hours, and the accompanying cheese on toast isn’t just cheese on toast. It’s grated cheddar mixed with mayonnaise, egg, seasoning, finely chopped spring onions—blitzed into a kind of magical cheesy mousse that puffs up under the grill like something from a cookery show finale. And that’s just the side dish.
Meanwhile, all I sometimes want is a baked potato. Not even a good baked potato—just a normal one, with the skin a bit too hard, and something from a plastic tub slathered on top. Coronation chicken. Tuna sweetcorn. Something that involves a fork and no pans. And I want—just once in a while—for my husband to be happy with that. Not euphoric. Not amazed. Just content.
Because while living with a foodie spouse is, in so many ways, a blessing, it’s also a bit like running a slightly chaotic, perpetually open restaurant. A small, not terribly efficient one where the menu is ever-changing and the dishwasher never quite catches up. Or as my husband himself once described it: a bad hotel with two permanently dissatisfied guests.
Don’t get me wrong—his food is wonderful. He reads cookbooks in bed like thrillers. He’s constantly learning, tweaking, improving. His roast potatoes have been known to bring friends to tears. Our children eat olives and anchovies and things I wouldn’t have gone near until I was well into adulthood. Dinner is often an event, even on a Tuesday.
But my god, the effort.
The shopping alone is like a scavenger hunt: preserved lemons, stem ginger, specific kinds of mustard, and anchovies in oil, not brine, because apparently that matters. Now that our daughter has caught the foodie bug too, I find myself in Tesco having surreal conversations with bewildered assistants as we comb the aisles for amaretti biscuits and the “right kind” of couscous. The staff probably think we’re running a supper club out of our kitchen.
At home, there’s always something bubbling, roasting, proving, fermenting, or being rested. Our kitchen never sleeps. And the cleaning up—oh, the cleaning up—has become a sort of second job. I measure the success of a dish not by how it tastes, but by how many things it used that can’t go in the dishwasher.
So no, it’s not that I’m desperate for beans on toast. I don’t secretly long to live on freezer food. What I crave is the freedom to serve something utterly average without feeling like I’ve let the team down. A meal that takes five minutes to make and three minutes to clean up. One plate, one fork, no judgement.
Sometimes, when I take the kids away for a weekend and my husband stays behind to work, we go rogue. We eat scampi and chips and microwaveable pasta with the little plastic pots of sauce. We sit in front of the telly with chicken nuggets and ketchup, and I revel in the glorious simplicity of it all. The kids barely tolerate it these days—“It’s not like Daddy’s,” they say with a sigh—but for me, it’s a holiday in every sense.
Of course, at home, it’s usually me who cooks for the kids. And they eat my simpler meals quite happily. But when it comes to my husband, I can always tell when I’ve disappointed him. He’s far too polite to say so, but his face gives him away. Especially when I’ve made the cheese on toast for the soup—just a slice of cheddar on dry bread, maybe a sprinkle of pepper if I’m feeling fancy. He eats it, but I can see the flicker of sadness, like he’s mourning what could have been. The pause before he says “Mmm, nice,” is just a touch too long. That pause speaks volumes.
And really, who can blame him? His standards are high because he genuinely loves food. It’s his creative outlet, his happy place. And the truth is, we’re lucky to live with someone who’s so passionate, so committed, so willing to try new ideas and recipes, even when they fail spectacularly. (And yes, some of them do fail. Not often. But enough that we still talk about the months, no, years of him trying to make sourdough bread with with a slight shudder.)
But still. Still.
There is a place in this world for humble food. For toast with Marmite, for fish finger sandwiches, for baked beans straight from the tin if it comes to it. For meals that are forgettable, un-photographable, and require no garnish. Because sometimes, just sometimes, what I want most is not a culinary experience, but just a full belly and a clean kitchen.
There’s a balance to be struck. Between nourishing and over-performing. Between the joyful, creative chaos of a proper home-cooked meal—and the peace that comes from a ready meal, a tray, and no comments.
And sometimes, the best seasoning of all is simply: I didn’t have to wash up afterward.