With greater numbers of people now working from home, Covid has put the question of food squarely on the table
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The question takes various forms in different households and often turns on an appetite for risk. Distilled down to basics, it can be expressed as follows: what's for dinner when I get home?
Depending on the nature of your domestic set-up and aversion to stereotypical 1950s-style rhetoric, there can be several answers.
One of them is indignation, because I'm sure I wouldn't have put it that bluntly pre-Covid, coming home from the office, as I used to do. Otherwise the answer might have been "nothing".
But now that I work from home and my other half heads off to the coal face each morning, it's interesting what passes as palatable at the end of the day.
The most enlightened answer is "that's a fair question" because working from home does free up time normally spent in transit.
Time that can apparently be spent doing things like the cooking, cleaning, washing, mowing, renovations - the list gets pretty long, pretty quick, and here's hoping that a vaccine is not too far away. But of course it's not too much to ask to have something on the table when the other half gets home.
It's what mature loving adults accept as plain, decent loathsome obligation - I mean, courtesy. And when I say "something on the table" I don't mean the breakfast dishes.
Ideally we're talking a meal that is not only identifiable, but also tasty, flavoursome and of some health benefit beyond mere morale boosting. Any meal can be construed as better than none, and I've often been in the unfortunate position of having to spruik it that way. But the cooking bar has been set slightly above "bare nourishment" height these days and I blame MasterChef.
What a person cooks can be a sensitive topic, depending on the chef's tolerance for criticism for what they throw up.
By "throw up" I don't mean physical reaction from the audience - it's more a reference to aims and execution.
Cooking, as anyone tasked will tell you, takes planning, and if you don't cook to plan, you don't plan to cook.
Appealing as that last option seems, it doesn't wash with hangry people.
So you strive for excellence but accept there will be highs and lows, and that things might get said (or worse, not said, like "mmm, this tastes great").
Often for good reason due to the gap between tasting great and the alternative.
It's no good having a Barilaro moment at this stage and threatening to take your bat home and bash a koala. Because you my friend are home and you are the koala.
No point, either, staging a Sco-Mo style gas-fired blow-up, because now is not the time for energy stagnation at the cooktop.
Now is actually the time to aim up and get some lovin' in that oven.
Because when it's all said and done, this is the true essential ingredient to any recipe for success in the kitchen whether your working from home or not.
