Esther Walker - Bad Cook

At first no-one read it and no-one cared. And one miserable January day, I deleted it. Stupid thing. What am I doing? What sort of journalist writes for free on the Internet? A few hours later a girl got in touch with me over Twitter, also still in its infancy. ‘You don’t know me,’ she said, ‘but I used to read your blog and I enjoyed it. Where has it gone?’ Well, I am one of those sorts of people who can live on the slimmest sliver of attention, let alone an actual compliment, for weeks. I blamed the disappearance of the blog on a technical fault, reinstated it and never looked back.

And, like I said, I am a writer and not a cook and so inevitably I ended up sneaking in tracts of what I thought was magnificent and literary prose, mostly about me, at the top of a post and then linking in some desperate way to a food topic and then sticking a recipe for something or other at the end.

Still people stayed and read on and told me I was funny. They contacted me to say that they had just read every single post on the blog, one after the other. ‘I am addicted to your blog,’ they would say. ‘I am obsessed with it. I am your stalker.’ Some of them even tried out the recipes and – this always made me fall about laughing – would ask me for cooking advice. Friends would email and text, bright with furious envy. ‘I met someone,’ they would shriek, ‘who reads your blog . They say it’s brilliant .’ I was delirious. This was TERRIFIC. I couldn’t stop writing even if I wanted to. I was making people jealous .

What you have in your hands is the essence, if you like, of Recipe Rifle . It is no longer called Recipe Rifle because Recipe Rifle is such a terrible title, chosen in a moment of desperation. It should have been called The Bad Cook all along, but it’s too late now. Some posts are chosen by me, a lot are chosen by my readers. I thought hard and fretted long about how to stuff this into some sort of story arc but in the end decided that was stupid. This is just the best bits of the blog, with the occasional new bit thrown in to make my publisher happy.

I once read in a magazine – I forget which one now – a problem on the problem pages that went something like this:

Q. My husband refuses to pick his towel up off the bathroom floor. It drives me demented. How can I punish him?

A. Instead of wanting to punish him, why don’t you think to yourself, as you pick the towel up off the bathroom floor, of all the nice things he does for you without you asking? It is little acts of devotion like these that keep marriages going.

Here are some of the annoying things that my husband does:

– He doesn’t pick up the bathmat off the bathroom floor.

– He clears his throat in quite an annoying way.

– He steals my car key because he can’t be bothered to find his, then accuses me of having used, and lost his key (thus forcing him to use mine).

– He will turn to me and say ‘Shall I have a shower? Or not?’.

– If the TV is on and he wants to say something, rather than finding the remote and pausing the programme he will shout ‘PAUSE!’ which is my cue to find the remote (under his bum, usually) and pause the programme for him so he may deliver his opinion.

– He will suddenly decide that the house is a mess and pick things up randomly (an unopened letter, a pair of flip-flops, a baby’s toy) and say ‘What's the story with this? Should it be here?’

– He will walk into his own kitchen and wonder aloud where we keep the knives, forks, salt, pepper, plates and so on.

Here are some of the annoying things that I do:

– I pick at my cuticles. Constantly.

– I clear my throat in a nice way. But I do it ALL the time.

– I never open my post, particularly anything that looks financial.

– I interrupt.

– I give my husband death stares.

– I am a sluttish washer-upper.

– I sometimes only empty half of the dishwasher and then wander off to do something else and forget to unload the rest.

– I throw money (his) at any problem.

– I leave the area around the toaster a mess, attracting ants and wasps.

– I don’t make the bed.

Here are the nice things that my husband does for me:

– He doesn’t make me go and get a job.

– He does my tax.

– He takes out all the bins and deals with the compost.

– He sorts out the cars, the tax for the cars, the maintenance of the cars.

– He doesn’t make me see people I don’t like.

– He’ll make any phone call for me that I’m too scared to make.

– He cleans all my hair out of the trap in the shower.

– He can fix almost anything in the house that has broken.

– When I have been devastatingly amusing about someone, he doesn’t declare that I am a ‘bitch’.

Here are the nice things that I do for my husband:

– I hang up the bathmat.

– I always make sure there is enough deodorant, shampoo, shower gel etc in the bathroom.

– Ditto for the kitchen.

– Ditto stamps, birthday cards and wrapping paper.

– I sort out dinner, pretty much every night.

– I make sure there’s always enough cash for the cleaner, ditto cleaning products.

– When we go on holiday I cancel the papers and the milk.

– At parties, I whisper names he has forgotten in his ear.

– I don’t give him shit about going out and getting drunk.

– I don’t give him shit about his swearing or bad taste jokes.

Whenever my husband has done something annoying and I feel enervated, I always run those lists through my head. It’s what my marriage balances on, like a fat elephant on a plank of wood on a ball bearing.

But a few years ago, I realized that my husband was NOT aware that there was this careful balancing act going on. He did not think, as he ignored my throat-clearing, cuticle-picking, death-staring grotesqueness, that he was simply keeping up his end of the bargain. He believed that he was bearing the brunt of marital irritation, while I sailed through life blithely un-irritated. One day, things exploded in a terrible row about me not making the bed.

I won’t lie, there were tears.

Then I explained about the list. About the importance of acts of devotion. And he got it, more or less. And that’s why I’m always sorting out dinner; it’s part of the deal. It’s why I try to find new things to cook, rather than just doing a roast chicken or pasta over and over again. If it’s going to be my area, I might as well have a big repertoire. It makes everything easier.

Which explains why I tried out this lamb shank curry. Yes, fine, it’s just another bloody curry, but the appealing thing about this to me was that it is tomato-based and therefore unusual and new and exciting.

Let’s go now. Let’s fly you and I away from this gloomy now, to a different time, back six years, to when I was working on Londoner’s Diary, which as I’m sure you know is the gossip page of the Evening Standard .

One day a new girl appeared in the editor’s office. The editor liked to have a lot of girls around and she was very mean to all of them. She thought she was in The Devil Wears Prada or something and that being mean to your assistants is terribly glamorous, but we knew that we were actually in a scummy daily newspaper office in West London and that people who are mean to their assistants are bitches who will rot in hell.

The editor’s girls didn’t usually last. They all had office affairs eventually, which then went sour, then they went on sick leave, then never came back. But Connie, or ‘Beautiful Connie’ as she quickly became known, was different. She was smart. She couldn’t have been less interested in the skinny boys on news or any of the grizzly bears on the back bench. Her boyfriends were always incredibly tall mega-Sloanes she’d known since she was six, who thought journalists were dismal little people. Yet there was a steely glint in her sleepy brown eyes, a hard edge to her long blonde hair and a no-nonsense air about her flower-patterned mini dresses.