Sunday’s playlist:
Sunday:
Rising late, stubborn and unwilling to face the morning cold, I eat a modest breakfast: yogurt, a banana, a coffee. As I eat I listen to some country favourites and get myself up to speed on the weekend’s football results, a lingering tradition from lockdowns spent with a football fanatic, despite not supporting a team or even watching the games myself.
My friend and I orchestrated a plan to bake focaccia this afternoon, so I refresh my limited knowledge on the subject by watching Samin Nosrat and Brad Leone cook one together on his show, It’s Alive. Sufficiently educated and buoyant after watching their chaotic chemistry on set together, I set about cleaning the kitchen and gathering utensils and ingredients together ready for the big bake. My friend arrives bearing homemade brownies and we share these over coffee and catch up while we prep the ingredients. Baking bread allows for a very social cooking experience, with multiple breaks to prove the dough in which we sip tea and sit outside in the cool autumn afternoon, surrounded by a wash of fallen leaves. I notice a wonderful crop of oyster mushrooms on a tree stump on the border of our garden, and snap a photo to remind myself to identify them online later on.
We shape the focaccia and top it with olives, tomatoes and rosemary, dancing excited little jigs in anticipation of the forthcoming feast. It turns out wonderfully, and we congratulate ourselves, fantasising about opening up a little café of our own one day, founded on this small success.
Once it leaves the oven, no more than thirty seconds expires before my housemates descend to sample our creation. Though the bread is fantastic on its own, I assemble cute little sandwiches of pesto and mozzarella to feed our hungry entourage, forming a queue out the kitchen door.
On a recurring theme for most Sunday evenings, I find myself without anything to make for dinner, and lamenting the early closure of the local supermarket, decide to end the week with a takeaway from the excellent Wawin, a vegan Chinese restaurant. I order faux chicken in black bean and green pepper sauce, fried rice and a side of hot and sour soup, which delivers on the heat and the sour but is thickened with too much corn starch, rendering it into more of a sauce than a soup, so I save it in hopes of finding a use for it tomorrow while the rest gets quite happily devoured. With a stomach full of good food and a heart full of good times, I play music with my housemates into the late hours of the night.
Alex's pronouns are he/him.
Alex is 23 years old who is currently based in Leeds. He plays keys in the bands Gladboy and Bug Teeth and he works in a sushi restaurant as a day job. He has been fascinated with food since he was young and next to music it's his brightest passion!