The little thermometer on the fridge said 27 at five o'clock on Monday, and the oven stayed off. The back door was wide open, Mabel was lying flat on the hall tiles like a draught excluder, and I stood in the kitchen with a cold flannel on my neck deciding that nobody in this house was going to eat a hot tea. Tea is at 5:30 and nobody wanted it hot.
It's been hot on and off since June, and this was the week I decided to stop fighting it. Here's what we ate, from Monday 7 July to Saturday 12 July, and what it cost.
Six teas, no oven
- Monday: pasta salad. Fusilli cooked on Sunday night and cooled in the fridge, with cherry tomatoes, cucumber, sweetcorn, cheese cubes and ham, and bread to mop up. £5.90.
- Tuesday: chicken and salad wraps. Brownies night, so it had to be fast. Sliced cooked chicken, lettuce, grated carrot, a squeeze of mayonnaise. £6.80.
- Wednesday: a ploughman's plate. Cheddar, ham, boiled eggs, pickle, pickled onions, apple, cucumber and crusty bread. This one also had £2.70 of cold tomato soup nobody wanted. £8.60 all in.
- Thursday: noodle salad. Egg noodles, carrot, cucumber and spring onion with a peanut butter and soy dressing. The only thing on the hob was one pan of water for four minutes. £5.20.
- Friday: the chippy. It was a chippy week, so £29.40 for four, eaten on the grass in the back garden out of the paper. This isn't counted below.
- Saturday: Rob's chicken pittas. Chicken thigh pieces on the griddle pan with the back door open, pitta, yoghurt and cucumber, salad. £9.10. Hob, not oven, so Rob says it counts.
Tonight is whatever's left in the fridge, on plates, outside.
What stuck and what didn't
The ploughman's plate was the hit. Rob had his on the back step before five-a-side with the plate on his knees, and Isla ate every pickled onion. The noodle salad came second. Isla said cold noodles were weird and then had seconds. Alfie ate the noodles without a single thing on them and the cucumber off Rob's plate, which I'm calling vegetables.
The pasta salad is going on the regular list, with a different dressing. Isla pointed out that it was the same one she'd had in her lunchbox on Friday, which I'd forgotten, and she wasn't wrong. Alfie ate the pasta and the cheese and lined up the sweetcorn along the edge of the bowl for later.
The chippy was the best tea of the week for the least effort. The grass at the bottom of the garden has gone brown and crunchy, and we sat on a picnic blanket with the paper open between us while the ants found the chips within a minute. Jean leaned over the fence to ask what we were having, and Alfie held up a chip to show her. There was no washing-up except the vinegar bottle.
The cold tomato soup was a failure. I'd made it on Wednesday afternoon in a fit of ambition and nobody went back for more. Rob said it tasted like pasta sauce that had given up. Alfie asked, with the clarity of someone who has had enough, "Why is tea all cold?" I said because it was boiling outside. He said, "Then why can't we have ice cream?" I'd like to say I had an answer.
Most of it went down the sink on Friday. The jug is still soaking, and so is my pride.
Against the usual
Here is the surprise: cold teas aren't cheaper. The five I cooked, leaving out the chippy, came to £35.60 for twenty plates, which is £1.78 a plate, against the £1.65 I usually land on. Cooked meat, cheese, salad and bread cost more than a pan of mince and pasta, and a lot of the cost is the cooked chicken. The pleasure is that the kitchen stays at 27 and not 31, and the heat isn't being made twice.
The sums: five teas £35.60, one chippy £29.40, £65.00 for the six. The oven, which I didn't switch on once, would have cost about 17p an evening in gas by my guess, so that isn't why I left it off. The kitchen stayed liveable and so did I. I'll go back to roasting when the thermometer says 20.
