In kitchen limbo, I daydreamed about my cheese grater

I moved out of one place and had a gap before I could move into the new one. This meant staying with family, which meant not having my own kitchen, and not having my own implements or utensils. My cheese grater isn’t even fancy – I think it’s from Ikea – but I know what I like: a sharp box grater that does big shreds of cheese and occasionally takes pieces of your thumb with it. This is hard to replicate. Most graters offer pathetic wisps, and as such, are a letdown. I love cooking a particular pink pasta dish which is mostly made of grated beetroot, and it is tough to find a grater that is up to the task. I started to daydream about my kitchen stuff, languishing in the storage unit. My trusty grater could have shredded any beetroot in seconds.

This kitchen limbo lasted for about six weeks. I kept remembering surprising things and then missing them – like the yellow plastic attachment on the Le Micro Magimix, which is great for making a fake mayonnaise out of chickpea water (I’m not vegan, but real mayonnaise, which I call greasy egg juice, turns my stomach). I missed every single one of my cookbooks, especially Ixta Belfrage’s Mezcla, which includes two recipes that usually see me through summer: a tomato salad with crumpet croutons, a truly genius invention; and a cold mackerel noodle dish, though you can use tofu and it’s just as nice. Not having that book during three near-consecutive heatwaves was foolish, and led to a handful of disappointing half-remembered replica attempts. I missed my favourite tea mug, my own kettle, and a plate designated “the breakfast plate” for no good reason, but which I like simply because it is midway between being small and big.

Eventually, it was time. The boxes arrived. In my head, getting the new kitchen sorted was more important than having a bed, so I tackled that first. I had romanticised my reunions with the Good Baking Tray (Lakeland, since you ask), the dog’s special fork, and that irreplaceable, irresistible cheese grater. Having my own stuff would mean being able to cook properly again. I wondered, idly, what we would make on that first night. Something with loads of spices, requiring multiple utensils and pans and trays; something that would mean standing at the cooker for hours with the radio on. That, to me, is home.

What those boxes soon came to reveal, actually, was how horribly, disgustingly faddy I am. Each one held up a mirror to culinary interests that flared and disappeared, leaving a pile of stuff in their wake. I unpacked the lockdown taco press, the two bulky wooden racks for drying the fresh pasta that gets made once every three years at most, and a box of “pickle pebbles”, presumably for use in the fermenting that I was definitely going to try. At one point, I found a cheese thermometer. I have never made cheese.

Years ago, I picked up a “square egg maker” from a car boot sale for 50p. It compresses boiled eggs into a cube shape, to make the slices fit into a sandwich better. I bought it because, on the packaging, there is a cartoon chicken saying “ouch”. Still funny, I thought, as I popped it on the shelf, where it will sit, untouched, for many years to come.

When every box had been emptied and flattened, much like my spirits, it was time for dinner. We did not have tacos, or homemade cheese, or square eggs. As they say, moving really is stressful, so we ordered a pizza and ate it out of the box. OFM

Rachel Cooke is away

Photograph by Adam Gault/Getty