MORE PLEASE - COOKING IN THE FIRST TRIMESTER

On Quiche Lorraine, impending motherhood and what it felt like to be a chef who couldn't bear cooking

Hello everyone - this post will be free for all to read for 5 days, then it will be switched to paid only.

TW - This is a post about pregnancy.

Very excitingly, I am pregnant with our first child. It feels odd writing that down, even though I have been dying to tell you all. I am over halfway through now and definitely in the swing of things, so to speak. I would say that by “in the swing of things” I mean I am no longer absolutely terrified at all the massive changes happening physically and mentally, simply faintly surprised and then resigned to them. Pregnancy is so, so much more intense and bonkers and bizarre and wonderful and tough than I had ever imagined. It became clear to me early on that I had romanticised it substantially. Well, my eyes are open now. And I haven’t even got to the parenting part.

It’s worth saying that I am so far having a normal pregnancy, that is to say I haven’t suffered severely at any point like others can. I am lucky, so very lucky to even be in this position, and I know that. But there was a period I found extremely tough as many others do, perhaps for reasons less common than most. The first trimester (the first 3 months of your pregnancy) is often said to be when pregnant people can feel the worst. The intense hormonal shifts and the vast changes going on internally, not to mention the sheer energy required to grow body parts can cause nausea, sickness, extreme fatigue and a myriad of other symptoms. I recommend reading Olivia Sudjic’s brilliant piece for Vittles on suffering from Hyperemesis Gravidarum to get a sense of how bad it can get, and the book Matrescence by Lucy Jones to understand a bit more about what’s going on inside.

My nausea started at around 4 weeks. I was writing recipes for this newsletter in fact when I realised that they all sounded disgusting to me, despite them being my own ideas which typically I am a big fan of. It was too late to change plan, I had already advertised them to you all and shopped for them. So I ploughed on. It wasn’t too bad in the end - they were veggie recipes so there wasn’t anything gruesome about them as such. I was struck, however, by how un-enjoyable it was.

For the past 20 odd years of my life I have loved cooking. Chopping an onion, a sometimes boring and stinky thing, is joyful to me. It means the start of something good. Food and its creation is the only job I have ever done, and I adore it body and soul. On a good recipe testing day or food styling shoot I often feel like a superhero chemist playing with ratios and reactions, correctly predicting results or correcting things. Cooking relaxes me, grounds me and makes me feel powerful. That first day, when nothing tasted good and nothing felt good, I was thrown. It’s an enormous privilege to admit that I didn’t know what it felt like to make something and not feel joy for it. I certainly didn’t know what it felt like to be actively repulsed by it. But here I was, looking at the leftovers desperate to bin the lot and never set foot in the kitchen again.

My hatred of those leftovers was a sign of things to come. The nausea worsened, over the course of the following week I went from being OK if I held my nose to gagging whenever I opened the fridge. I had to keep cooking though because that is my job. This week’s task was developing a steak recipe and of course I had to bloody get the nice dry aged stuff with thick fat cap that smelled about as beefy as shift on the floor at Magic Mikes. I cried as I stood in the butchers, trying to mask the smell of the meat by scarfing down a bar of chocolate. Sorry to the nice girl who said hi to me that day, I was in bits. I didn’t want to admit yet that cooking, my trusted companion, had become torture. I tried to have perspective. At least you work for yourself, I thought. Imagine being a chef in a commercial kitchen with nowhere to go and no one to talk to.

One of the hardest bits about those early days is that many people, myself included, don’t tell anyone that they are pregnant. Of course my husband knew, but we agreed that we would keep things quiet until we could have a conclusive early scan that told us baby was ok. It felt like we would jinx it if we announced it, that our happiness was something that could hurt our baby. It makes absolutely no sense really, because if something had happened to it, I would need to tell my nearest and dearest. I would need their support. But in many ways, as well as protecting our baby, you don’t tell people because you want to protect them too from potential disappointment. I hate lying, and it made me feel sicker. I wanted to break down in tears on the phone to my mum. I wanted to message my friends who were already mums and ask them how bad does it get. I didn’t though, and I regret it. I will do it differently if I get a next time around.

I found that one of the toughest things about morning sickness (oh and it’s all day sickness, by the way) was that I couldn’t trust the things I would normally use for comfort. Food, cooking and eating have always been therapeutic to me, for better or worse. Most of the content I was creating, for here or for other publications or for instagram was, to me, absolutely inedible. Like many others in my shoes, I was restricted to a mostly beige diet, minimal red meat, minimal veg. Noodles, toast, cereal, anything breaded from the freezer section, all potato products and pasta were thankfully ok, although I definitely got very, very fed up with a few of them.

You might be thinking “well why didn’t you just write about the food you were cooking?”. Well firstly, as good as they are, it would have been hard to write about the chicken goujons from Iceland every week. Secondly, the minute I knew I was pregnant a deadline loomed in my head. All I could think about was how much I needed to achieve before baby arrived. I am self-employed and won’t have any paid maternity leave, so not only was I suddenly aware of needing to make as much money as possible before I do take some time away, but I also was suddenly struck with an existential dread. Who am I? What actually is my career? What am I pausing and what will I have to come back to? I suddenly felt this huge pressure to achieve as much as possible, while feeling as shit as possible. I had to pretend that everything was fine. And listen, for those of you who are reading this thinking “that was your choice”, you’re right, it was. I chose to try and have a baby, and I am lucky to be able to. It doesn’t make it any less terrifying, especially when your whole identity seems to have changed overnight.

I didn’t do a brilliant job at the above, let me tell you. There were so many days where I just lay on the sofa, weeping at episodes of The Sex Lives of College Girls. I ate SO many chicken goujons, bowls of instant noodles, packs and packs of cereal. Another cruel irony of morning sickness is that the only thing that makes you feel better is eating. Every piece of literature out there talks about how you need to nourish your baby with a balanced diet. Well, before I hit 12 weeks I had gone through 4 or 5 Family sized tubs of Lurpak butter. The food I craved was what my mum called “nursery food” ie. food you were given as a child. I wanted baked potatoes, sausages with buttered toast on the side, and for one short phase, Quiche. It was the day I brought home a Sainsbury’s Quiche Lorraine and cooked it up for lunch that it really clicked for my husband how bad I was feeling. I am not going to sit here and say that I normally make every meal from scratch, but I definitely err on that side of things. To him, watching me eating a pre-made, heated up in a foil tray Quiche was the height of bizarre. I loved it. It was a taste of home, of cosy dinners and evenings watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So, I decided to honour my first trimester and the weirdness of it with a really good recipe for a true classic - Quiche Lorraine.

I am happy to say I feel much better now and my relationship with food is almost back to normal. I still can’t eat really beefy beef and a few other things, including many of the recipes from that period, and I now have a crippling obsession with ice cream. But I am taking that one as a win. I suppose writing this piece has been a bit of therapy for me. I needed to exorcise that first couple of months and talk about a time that food, a currency I have traded in, a language I have spoken for so long, betrayed me. One thing that helped me in that first part was hearing other peoples honesty about their pregnancies. Knowing that what I was going through was common and that other people understood how I felt made me feel a tiny bit less lonely. Maybe someone reading this will feel the same.

Quiche Lorraine

A really delicious quiche is a very useful thing to be able to make. I think they are a lost art and wish we would see more of them. This past weekend we went to Coombeshead Farm , we go every year on the second weekend in May. At breakfast they often serve a quiche and they are always exquisite, sometimes the best thing about an already incredible buffet. So I asked the chef for his tips and they helped me create the below. Serve it with a baked potato or some chips for the ultimate first trimester plate (or a green salad if you’re feeling normal).

For the pastry (or you can buy a block of shortcrust if you prefer!)

• 220g plain flour

• 100g cold, unsalted butter

• 2 egg yolks

• 5g salt

• 4 - 5 tbsps iced water to bind

For the filling

• 200g smoked bacon lardons

• 8 medium eggs

• 2 egg yolks

• 350ml double cream

• 70g gruyere cheese, finely grated

• 1/2 tsp flakey sea salt

• a good grating of fresh black pepper and nutmeg

• 20cm Springform cake tin

Pop the flour and salt into the based of a food processor. Add the diced butter and then pulse a few times to combine. You are looking to reduce the butter into smaller chunky nubbins, around the size of a pine nut/flaked almond, rather than aiming for a breadcrumb texture like when you make a crumble. The chunks of butter are what help keep the pastry flakey. Now pour in the egg yolks and pulse again a few times to distribute them well. Finally, pour in the water, starting with 2 tablespoons and adding more if you need it. You want the pastry to go from floury to sandy, it will start to clump together in the machine. Remove from the bowl and bring together on a clean surface. Shape into a circle, cover with clingfilm and chill for at least 1 hour in the fridge.

When the pastry has chilled, roll it out to a wide, flat circle on a floured surface around 5 - 8 mm thick. There is plenty of pastry here (I prefer to have more to work with than less) so be prepared for your circle to be pretty wide. Carefully fold it into four and place it into the bottom of your tin, then unfurl the folds and press the pastry into the sides of the tin. There will be lots of overhang. Once the pastry nicely pressed and even on all sides, use a sharp knife to trim off the excess. Prick the base of the pastry with a fork and chill for at least 1 hour again.

To make the filling, heat a large, non-stick pan on a low heat and add in the bacon. Let it cook and render slowly until crisp - around 15 minutes. Leave to cool. In a jug combine the eggs, egg yolks, cream, salt and pepper and nutmeg. Use a hand blender to blitz the mix together to make it very smooth.

Preheat the oven to 170 fan. Weigh down your pastry case with some baking beans in parchment paper and blind bake it for 20 minutes. Carefully remove the baking paper filled with beans, prick the base with a fork again and bake for a further 15 minutes.

When the case is baked and golden brown, put the cooked bacon in the bottom. Carefully pour half of the egg mix in, add half the cheese, stir it together a bit, then pour in the rest of the egg mix. Stir most of the remaining cheese through, leaving enough for a layer on the top. Bake at 170 for 30 minutes, then reduce the oven temperature to 160 and bake for a further 15 minutes. It should be golden brown and still a bit wobbly when it comes out. Cool on a rack for 30 minutes, then carefully remove the sleeve of the tin. Cool for another hour, then serve.

MAKE AHEAD -

• The pastry will keep in the fridge for up to 24 hours

• Cook the bacon up to 24 hours ahead.

• The quiche will be great for 3 days, chill in the fridge when completely cooled.

SUBSTITUTIONS -

• Add in your favourite herbs, cooked spinach, some crumbled goats cheese or feta, caramelised onions - the quiche is your oyster!