Name: Midnight Chicken
ISBN: 9781526623898

Ella Risbridger

& Other Recipes Worth Living For

Midnight Chicken

leonie wise

In offices, and tower blocks, and grey buildings in the city centre, the minute the sky peeks blue and bright through the double glazing, I start dreaming of gingham cloths and blue-rimmed white enamel; of tender little samosa-like parcels, filo on the outside, spiced lamb or bright peas on the inside; good bread or crackers, ready to heap with red pepper hummus and green harissa hummus; lazy tangles of quick-pickled onions, done in a matter of hours with a splash of vinegar, sugar and spices; an enormous wedge of pork pie, studded with boiled eggs, the golden yolks still a little soft and yielding to the knife. A Thermos of something boozy and hot, with the wind tugging at your hair, and the chill of it on your fingers.

It is so easy to eat distractedly: to have one hand on your phone, or one eye on your emails, or half a mind on what fork to use next. It is so easy to eat without thinking about what you are eating, or how you are eating it. But if you strip away the tablecloths and the cutlery and the manners, you strip away everything that might come between you and the feeling of being really, vividly, absolutely alive: fingers in the chicken carcass, grease and salt on the lips, grass against bare legs. And you can do this, really, anywhere. You don't need to be in an Enid Blyton book to step outside, to make something lovely to eat, and to take it somewhere green or wild. Wherever you are, and whatever you are doing; you probably have a minute - ten minutes, even - to step outside and breathe in and out. You can have a picnic wherever you are.

I didn't know this when I was working in an office; I spent months eating pre-packaged sandwiches at my desk, and wishing I was dead. It would be unfair to blame all of this on the sandwiches, but what is true is that as soon as I found , a green place in the city, I felt better. I had sort of forgotten that wild places are everywhere; I had sort of forgotten, I think, to look for little wild things that might have made me feel like I belonged. I didn't really know about the small and tender loveliness of daffodils pushing up through the earth in a city park, the secret sweetness of unexpected moss on an Underground platform, the breathless, irrepressible joie de vivre of butterfly-studded buddleia pressing through a hoarding.

The world is so hard, and life is so short: you must make things lovely where you can. You have to make mundane things like packed lunches into something glorious and important and worth having. You have to make ordinary days worth having, is the thing - and investing a bit of time in what you eat and where you eat it (which is really investing a bit of time in looking after yourself) is one of the easiest ways to do it.

Recipes that reveal the life-changing happiness of cooking There are lots of ways to start a story, but this one begins with a chicken... There was a time when, for Ella Risbridger, the world had become overwhelming. Sounds were too loud, colours were too bright, everyone moved too fast. One night she found herself lying on her kitchen floor, wondering if she would ever get up – and it was the thought of a chicken, of roasting it, and of eating it, that got her to her feet and made her want to be alive. Midnight Chicken is a cookbook. Or, at least, you'll flick through these pages and find recipes so inviting that you will head straight for the kitchen: roast garlic and tomato soup, uplifting chilli-lemon spaghetti, charred leek lasagne, squash skillet pie, spicy fish finger sandwiches and burnt-butter brownies. It's the kind of cooking you can do a little bit drunk, that is probably better if you've got a bottle of wine open and a hunk of bread to mop up the sauce. But if you settle down and read it with a cup of tea (or a glass of that wine), you'll also discover that it's an annotated list of things worth living for: a manifesto of moments worth living for. This is a cookbook to make you fall in love with the world again.

Midnight Chicken & Other Recipes Worth Living For