Depression stole her drive to cook. Recipes like this brought it back.
Someone in my family once told me, 'I don't believe in depression.' It was a startling statement, insulting to those of us who have experienced depressive episodes, and my reply was quick and sharp: 'Depression doesn't require you to believe in it. It exists whether you want it to or not.'
I'm a believer, and so is Meera Sodha. The London-based cookbook author and newspaper columnist had what she calls a 'breakdown' several years ago, severe enough to force her to step away from her Guardian column for a bit. Then one day her husband, Hugh, started to crack under the pressure of taking care of their baby and toddler along with his wife and himself. 'He said, 'Please, I'd really love it if you cooked me a meal,'' Sodha told me in a Zoom call from New York City, where she was on book tour.
Get the recipe: Matar Paneer
It was all she needed to hear, and it woke her up, literally and figuratively. 'I had always shown him love by cooking, and I think that's what he needed,' she said. She went from bed to kitchen, gathered ingredients, and made her version of one of their favorite dishes, a Malaysian dal. As she felt herself returning to life, she also realized that as a professional food writer, she had been doing this cooking thing all wrong.
'I'd cooked because it was a particular season or I was working on a particular vegetable,' subjects she was tackling for her column, she said. 'It's like, what would other people like for Easter? I didn't really think about myself.' Even her family was typically eating the results of her testing rather than, as she put it, 'the types of foods I had grown up eating myself,' or what she might crave in the moment.
She paved her path back from depression with a determination to change. As she writes in her new cookbook, 'I would cook for pleasure, not work. I wanted to try to become more aware of my mood and feelings and work out what I wanted to eat, and slowly but surely, like kindling catching, I started to feel the fire in my belly again.'
The orange notebook she kept in the kitchen, where she recorded thoughts about her day and her feelings — along with descriptions of dishes she made for her family — wasn't intended to become a cookbook. Eventually, she thought, it would be a keepsake for her girls. But when her editor and agent checked in on her, she told them she was coming up for air and might have the makings of her next project.
The result, 'Dinner,' is Sodha's ode to the kind of simple family meal that rejuvenated her during and after a dark period.
I've always loved Sodha's recipes — I'm particularly fond of her 2020 book, 'East' — but her newfound sense of freedom comes across in 'Dinner.' The recipes have a breezy, no-pressure vibe that feels like exactly what we all need in such a stressful, uncertain period. Think spicy sesame noodles with peanuts and Brussels sprouts, Sichuan-style charred green beans with crumbled tofu and mushrooms, and an herby fried-egg salad.
Sodha has a way of bringing just the right fresh touches to even traditional recipes. The one I couldn't resist sharing after I tested it is Matar Paneer, an Indian pea and paneer curry that she enriches with a cashew puree and brightens with crunchy snow peas. To add even more depth, you blister the snow peas — and some cherry tomatoes — in a skillet before building the rest of the dish.
The combination of textures and flavors makes the curry something you don't want to stop eating, which also makes it a particularly appropriate example of Sodha's other big message in 'Dinner': that lingering over the evening meal can help you press the reset button on a stressful day.
As someone who has also struggled to keep in touch with my own cravings and my own household cooking obligations even as I pursue new recipes for this column and for cookbooks, I adore any dish that can meet all those needs. I made the Matar Paneer for work colleagues first, then took leftovers home, where my teenage son was too occupied by his current fixation on red meat to notice them. I heated them up for my husband and myself, and over a satisfying dinner we exchanged workday recaps and brainstormed weekend plans.
Reset accomplished.
Get the recipe: Matar Paneer
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