I wrote, in hotter occasions, about my love of lunches so unbelievably primary and rustic, so depressingly unadorned that they had been positively medieval. A hunk of cheese on a board, with perhaps an apple and a stack of oaty crackers. A fillet of mackerel, oily and stinking, with – er – perhaps an apple. And a hunk of cheese. And a stack of oaty crackers. It’s the type of factor you may think about (taking away the crackers) an evil lord consuming within the Darkish Ages if he’d simply beheaded his cook dinner and had no person to arrange him a venison stew. There he would sit in his fortress, a kind of actually unaesthetic tapestries hanging behind him displaying a boar being disemboweled by an angel, or an unimpressed owl holding a trumpet, no matter mad imagery they had been into, and the lord could be hunched over his wood board spearing his cheese with a pronged torture-fork and chopping his apple together with his battleaxe. I’ve no downside with any of this. I don’t care that my lunches make me appear like an evil lord and I’m high quality with the truth that they’re primary. However I let you know, as winter drags on and the damp penetrates my bones, these chopping board lunches simply don’t hit the mark. I crave one thing extra. One thing equally healthful and rustic that requires no preparation however that additionally doesn’t serve itself up completely fridge-cold. I want concepts and have been scouring my recipe books for some options.Now: don’t say soup. I do know that soup exists, I’m not a moron. We fairly recurrently have soup at lunchtime, as a result of it’s straightforward and it’s heat, however each time we’ve got it I discover myself staring out of the window and pondering how there should be extra to life. If it was a very good do-it-yourself french onion soup with gruyere croutons then that will be completely different, but it surely by no means is. It’s soup purchased from the store. As a result of making soup from scratch takes longer than gestating an elephant.
