What to cook when you don’t feel like cooking

At a time when much of the world seems to be in a hellish spin cycle, it feels a little ungrateful to complain about one’s own very minor troubles, but nevertheless a combination of unexpected eye-watering vet’s bills (don’t get me started on pet insurance), my naive decision to bring out a lighthearted travel book about the United States in 2025 and a stack of deadlines means the past few weeks have left me feeling like a three-dimensional version of the exploding head emoji.

It’s not the kind of state that makes you feel much like cooking anything, yet obviously I’m not stressed enough to have lost my appetite completely. Apart from the day when I baked five batches of Viennese whirls (column coming soon!) and could then face nothing more than a tangerine, I’ve had to reconfigure my approach. Not that I was ever one for making a lasagne on a Tuesday evening, but comforting, low-stress meals such as my own Marmite spaghetti have been a godsend.

Indeed, there has been a bit of a retro theme to my cooking in general – Yotam Ottolenghi’s cheesy curried beans on toast, Signe Johansen’s fishfinger sandwich with Nordic dill salsa, Nigel Slater’s bubble and squeak fritters with lemon salsa verde (though, actually, I ate the latter with leftover Nordic dill salsa, because life’s too short to have two salsas on the go at once, even in Islington).

There has also been a Rachel Roddy chip omelette (after one night when I gave up and took the expensive little dog to the chippy instead, much to his delight) and Melek Erdal’s jazzed-up beans on toast – after a recent taste test, I have a lot of baked beans in the freezer.

Now that I think about it, the fact that the freezer won’t close properly is another thing I need to deal with. I made a start one Sunday by defrosting some black pudding for Patrick Powell’s colcannon with a black pudding sauce, fried egg and pickled jalapeño (anything that combines potato and a fried egg is automatic comfort), and I’m pretty sure there are some of my pierogi back there somewhere that should probably be eaten, and that would also go very well with that dill salsa, if I hadn’t finished it already.

Looking back at this parade of lovely stodge, I must also point out that there has been a lot of asparagus in my diet recently, mostly boiled in very salty water and drenched in butter to be mopped up with bread – AKA the quickest of all spring meals. And though I haven’t yet spotted any new-season fruit, I have my eye on Tamal Ray’s baked yoghurt with Indian mango.

Mostly, though, my sweet consumption has been in the rather less healthy or seasonal form of Easter eggs, broken up and eaten with one hand while hammering out 1,300 words on Viennese whirls with the other. Oh well, worse things happen at sea, as my grandma would have said. Wishing you all more cheer in the week ahead!

To the max | A friend sent me a fascinating New York Times article about “flavourmaxing”. The premise: evermore outlandishly complex flavour combinations (iced lavender cream oatmilk matcha! Dubai chocolate everything!) have spoiled our palates for simpler, more classic dishes. My preference for a plain butter croissant finally feels vindicated.

Putting on a show | I went for lunch last Thursday to the Yellow Bittern, the “self-consciously anachronistic” restaurant that created such astonishing hype when it opened down the road from me last year that I immediately crossed it off my list until the in-crowd had moved on. The food is good and simple – buttered asparagus, buttery chicken pie, chocolate cake – but the real attraction is the sheer theatre of watching chef Hugh Corcoran hack at chickens and dress salad behind a counter of ingredients set up like a Dutch still-life.

The best thing I read this week | I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that one of the stressful things in my life at the moment is that I’m going to Taiwan for a charity bike ride and have about five million things to do before I leave next week. A book getting me in the mood, however, is Yáng Shuāng-zĭ’s Taiwan Travelogue, translated by Lin King, winner of the US National Book Award for translated literature. As well as a complicated story of colonial power dynamics, it contains many mouthwatering descriptions of Taiwanese food.

Just what Dr Noodle ordered | I’ve had a mild fixation with the stretchy, chewy texture of tofu skins ever since trying them at the now-closed Sichuan restaurant Kaki, but I don’t often see them on a menu. So when I spotted a yuba and celery dish with garlic and chilli sauce at Dr Noodle just around the corner from the Guardian’s London office, I pounced on it. Less traditional is Brian Levy’s yuba lasagne, which I will definitely try soon.

One Club Row, London | Its name, writes Grace Dent, “sounds a bit like the title of a 1990s lads’ mag”, but she finds that “it’s actually a purposely shabby-chic room above a pub in Shoreditch that serves martinis, oysters and schnitzels in a heady, tipsy, twinkly atmosphere that itself may well remind you of the 1990s.” It’s not fine dining, she admits, but One Club Row will “make you feel carefree and cosseted”. Read the full review.