Cooking in Crip Time

An essay and recipe for spiced chickpea puffs. Words and photograph by Hannah Turner.

Good morning and welcome to Cooking From Life: a Vittles mini-season on cooking and eating at home everyday.

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Cooking from Life is a Vittles mini-season of essays that defy idealised versions of cooking – a window into how food and kitchen-life works for different people in different parts of the world. Cooking as refusals, heritage, messiness, routine. 

Our sixteenth writer for Cooking from Life is Hannah Turner. You can read our archive of recipes and essays here.

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Cooking in Crip Time

An essay and recipe for spiced chickpea puffs. Words and photograph by Hannah Turner.

On Friday afternoons I make a meal plan: I scour a photo album on my phone labelled ‘favourite meals’; I consult the list on my notes app titled ‘safe foods’. I fill a sheet of paper with missing ingredients as my boyfriend feigns shock that, once again, we must decide on six whole days’ worth of eating. It is a laborious part of the process, but we are fuelled by the desire to eat good all week long. Once the final meal is decided, he is sent packing, list in hand, to procure all we need for the cooking ahead. 

On Sundays my boyfriend consults the meal plan and makes two to three different dishes – always things that keep well in the fridge, or even taste better with time. We cook the meal we eat on Sunday evening with enough leftovers to feed us on Monday and Tuesday. We make something for lunches, and then one more dish that ages gracefully in the fridge to fill the in-betweens.   

We recently bought one of those vegetable-chopping devices, so I can perch on my kitchen stool and slice courgettes and dice onions whilst he measures and organises around me. More often than not, I quickly run out of energy and hand strength, so return to my bed for yet another rest. When I wake up, confused and grouchy, the apartment smells delicious. Tupperwares line the kitchen counter, and his arms are elbow-deep in the dishwater, whilst tonight’s meal sits patiently on the stove. Cooking like this can mean an afternoon, or sometimes most of the day, is all given over to preparing for the week ahead. Maybe it sounds unnecessary, a big commitment, or just impossible to you.

I begrudge the phrase meal prep because it evokes gym bros with chicken, white rice and broccoli, or identical but tiny salads served in tiny jars that I could finish in a mouthful. My boyfriend and I are ‘live to eat’ people, not to be muddled with ‘eat to live’ people. I assume most of you reading are the former, too. There are no plain, unseasoned vegetables in our weekly concoctions, and our working hours are only sustained by the thought of a good meal in the middle of the day. So be warned, this is not a guide to efficiently feeding your household, or how to streamline your cooking in order to increase work productivity. This is how we cook because good food is a reason to get out of bed, and as a person living in perpetual sickness, I am always in need of more of those.  

In Ellen Samuels’ essay ‘Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time’, they outline the ways sickness of the chronic kind fundamentally changes your relationship to temporality. Clock time means very little to me at this point. There have been weeks and months lost to beds, hospitals and bathroom floors. I work when I can, small scraps in the middle of the day, frantic late-night writing, and then I read and I sleep. Weekends are no different, only that people around me might take the chance to rest, too. Crip time is broken time is grief time is sick time. 

My schedule for meal prepping, as well as eating, is dictated by chronic nausea, medication regimes or fasting schedules ahead of tests and surgeries. Despite feeling at war with my body a lot of the time, food remains a way I find hope. Even if breakfast is at midday and days pass when I consume only beige on beige, the immediate joy I feel when tasting something delicious, made in our tiny Dutch kitchen, reminds me of the goodness I can still grasp onto.  

Negotiating the altered temporalities of chronic sickness requires my boyfriend to do the bulk of this food prep work. I instead write the lists, keep tabs on the pantry and wrack my brain for new recipes when we are sick of the old. Perhaps you have an urge to congratulate him, ask if I know how good I have it, how lucky I am to have found this man – as if he appeared at my doorstep waiting to be given chores. We have lived together for five years now – in that time we have learnt to ride the storms of sickness, and at different points in time have divided our household duties a hundred different ways. 

Emotional labour may be a phrase overused, but it feels a useful term when rebutting the oversimplified idea that chronically ill people are beholden to non-disabled partners who physically aid them in some way. I do a lot in our relationship, and most of it isn’t immediately visible, nor do I need to name it all for you. Cooking has historically been coded as feminine, and men in heterosexual relationships who wash dishes or know how to work a hoover are still considered a cut above the rest. 

There is no such thing as 50/50 division of labour, and it isn’t what we seek, either. Instead, I know that whilst these meals are cooked with love and tenderness, the fragments of energy I use to help him solve a PhD dilemma or book train tickets back to London are received with that same thanks. It isn’t You did this for me so I must for you; feeling indebted to those around us who are not sick is a fast-track to self-hatred of one’s dysfunctional body.  

Let us not pretend that he does not also benefit from our current regime: I know he prefers a vegetable biryani with spring greens to a soggy five-euro supermarket wrap. These pre-prepared meals feel like necessity at times, but bring us both different versions of joy and relief. 

If my existence is not dictated by joyful whims or strict work schedules but instead by unknowable sickness then, by extension, so is my partner’s. We, without choice, exist in our version of crip time, peripherally for him and all-encompassing for me. Crip time dictates food time, and so we have sacrificed so-called Sundays to feed us on Mondays (and beyond).  

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Recipe for spiced chickpea puffs 

I make a variation of these most weeks, we change up the fillings depending on what else we are prepping. Essentially it's a legume with a vegetable and some spices, tossed in a pan and then stuffed inside puff pastry - a bastardised cornish pasty perhaps? They are filling and easy to eat, can be packed in a box and survive my boyfriend’s cycle to work or reheated in the oven or microwave. 

Ingredients

·      2 tbsp olive oil
·      1 red onion (sub for courgette or carrot if onions don’t agree with you), diced
·      1 red pepper, diced
·      1tbsp Ras el Hanout 
·      1 tsp smoked paprika
·      1 tsp chilli flakes (optional)
·      1 x 400g tins chickpeas, drained
·      100g pitted olives of your choice, roughly chopped
·      ½  jar passata, about 350g
·      1 tsp sugar
·      2 x 320g sheets ready-made puff pastry, each sheet cut into 4 equal pieces
·      1 medium egg, beaten
·      Salt and pepper

Method

1.     First, dice the red onion and pepper. Roughly chop the olives. Drain the chickpeas and set everything to one side until needed.

2.     Warm the olive oil in a large frying pan set over a medium heat. Add the onion, pepper, Ras el Hanout, paprika, chilli flakes (if using) and a pinch of salt. Cook for 15-20 minutes, stirring frequently, until softened.

3.     Next, add the chickpeas, olives, passata, sugar and season generously with salt and pepper. Bring to a simmer and cook for 5-10 minutes, until thickened.

4.     Remove the pan from the heat and set aside to cool, at least 30 minutes – or longer if you have time. During this time remove the pastry from the fridge – this makes it easier to unroll without cracking – and preheat the oven to 200°C.

5.     Line two baking sheets, or shallow baking trays, with baking paper (you can use the paper that the pastry is wrapped in). Cut each sheet of pastry into 4 equal pieces and sit, evenly spaced out, on the baking sheets.

6.     Add a heaped spoonful of chickpea mixture to one half of a piece of pastry, fold the empty half over the top and press down with your fingers to seal. Cut three small slits in top and brush with a little egg. Repeat with the remaining mixture.

7.     Bake for 15-20 minutes, until golden. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool for 5 minutes or so before eating.

Notes from the author:

Other favourite combinations include lentils, potatoes and peas with garam masala and cumin seeds. Or black beans peppers and sweetcorn with cayenne pepper and paprika. Really the filling is just a vehicle to eat delicious buttery flaky pastry right?

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Please do not, under any circumstances, forward this to a sick person in your life with the message: have you tried meal prep? And do not, for a minute, sick reader, assume an ounce of guilt if your food life does not look like mine. Close down this essay, order a takeaway, and rest. 

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Credits

Hannah Turner is a disabled journalist, writer and producer. She creates work for and about her disabled community. Her work can be found in places such as Refinery29, The Wellcome Collection, Mashable and Stylist magazine. She publishes essays about books, reading habits and crip life on her substack, Sunday. Bookmarks. She likes to dress up and make silly outfit videos on her Instagram. She currently lives a quiet and joyful life in Amsterdam with her partner, Tom. 

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead. These recipes were tested by Joanna Jackson.