I shop, I eat - I cook?

OK.  I shop.  I eat.  But do I cook?  The answer is yes, I do.  However, I prefer to cook for others and as I live by myself, and I have a teeny-tiny studio flat, and I'm addicted to buying books (wonderful charity bookshops in the vicinity), I don't entertain much.  The current state of the (no) job market at the moment explains my budgetary restrictions, but as a rule I'm eating much more healthily than when I was working.  Then the temptation was, particularly living by myself, to stop off after work/drinks, pick up a shop-bought (there it is again), made who knows where lasagne/shepherd's pie/whatever, cram oneself into a First Capital Connect (there's a misnomer if ever there was one), and on arriving home bung the thing in the microwave.

Now I buy gorgeous, fresh, food with crunch where it should crunch and softness where it should be pliant and yielding, and all the textures in between.  Food to savour.  A (free range) chicken is roasted.  A tranche of (responsibly farmed) salmon is baked.  Both of these items do for several meals and replenish the energy used up in the gym.  Vegetables are raw or roasted - asparagus is steamed (as is broccoli).  Supermarkets are not visited often but are chosen for the deals they can offer.  Time is taken to trot happily from local shop to shop, looking at what's best to eat and in price.  Seasonal is always to be preferred, but seasonal stretches thanks to the propinquity of wonderful minority ethnic food shops to food from the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe and the Near and Middle East, as well as Africa and Asia (the latter in bottles or preserves rather than fresh - although there is an exception to be made for mangoes).

It's summer, so to be honest there's not a lot of cooking going on, but there is food to eat.  Apricots just coming into (early) season, a warm spring everywhere including the Mediterranean is paying off.  £1.99 for a kilo of them - downy skin, smouldering orange cooling to yellow (to paraphrase a poet I'm lucky enough to know) - slightly firm to the touch, ripening at home to soft luscious yielding fruit, sweet but slightly tart - perfect.

Here's the aforementioned roast chicken (leftovers), torn up into bite sized pieces, with medium dice cucumber (currently 4 for £1 from Fairline, Green Lanes), and a liberal dousing of chilli oil (with those wonderful chilli dregs).  Perfect.  Chicken - still soft because it has been properly roasted not carbonised - have you seen the cooking times recommended by the supermarkets on the label? - and of course, it's free range, a concession to the recession, I'll forego organic but there's no way I'd stoop to something caged in a shed, no matter what they call it.  Free range is the minimum standard and if it's too expensive then none at all.  Cucumber for crunch.  Chillies for spice and added savour.

Then there's my other favourite summer meal.  N.B. these two dishes comprise three ingredients each.  Good and simple.  It is of course the herring - you've been waiting for it, I know, after all, I can't just be buying and talking and writing about herring again and again without actually eating any, can I?  So, herring, horseradish (Kren/XPEN), and beetroot (Lidl, lovely big packs of beetroot for £0.59 a pack, not a smidgen of vinegar in sight).  Delicious, nutritious.

I wouldn't have it any other way.