Cooking

March 2025

I'm going through a particularly busy period at the moment, again (when will I ever learn?) One of the things I've been doing is a whole lot of cooking for people - there have been many recent cooking events, two of which included someone whose dietary requirements are the most restrictive I've had to deal with. 

The first meal was at the Birmingham Buddhist Centre, where I'm going to be volunteering on Tuesdays when I'm not doing something previously arranged (like volunteering elsewhere, staying with friends, and retreats). This is to cover for someone who's gone off to be ordained, so it's going to continue until mid July. The people who work there (including the one with the severely restricted diet) have a team lunch (which I will attend) followed by a team meeting (which I won't) and they take turns to cook. I'm only doing the cooking on alternate occasions that I'm there, along with jobs like testing the fire alarm, a bit of cleaning, and replacing consumables like toilet rolls, washing up liquid and hand soap. Having done a quick stock take, next time I'm there I'm going to go through the store cupboard to release some of the older jars back into the wild.

At the end of the day of that meal, for our regular weekly Buddhist meeting I'd offered supper to our visiting speaker who was coming from Milton Keynes. He got caught up in the terrible traffic mess nearby that has been caused by a large bridge installation for HS2, so it took him twice as long as it should. As well as inviting the team, I also invited someone who hasn't been to Lola Towers before, and he got completely lost, gave up, went to our meeting venue and missed supper altogether. He was leading the meeting the following week, so I gave him another chance.

The third cooking event was as a result of a fundraising auction, which I don't seem to have mentioned before. The Birmingham Buddhist Centre is in dire need of renovation, and one of the fundraising ideas was an auction of activities - things that people like to do that others could pay for. There were offers of lessons in paddleboarding, sourdough cooking, poetry, swimming, snooker, and crochet; there were guided walks in and around Birmingham; there were home-made items including clothing, jewellery, art and toys; there were press night tickets at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre; there were meals at a local cafe. I won a guided walk around Worcester, and I offered a three-course vegetarian or vegan meal for six, which went for £90 to one of the Buddhist communities in Birmingham, where six people live together in a shared house.

They wanted vegan food, and although the person with the dietary restrictions said she was fine to do some of it herself, I felt as a matter of principle that I should include her. So I created a soup out of all the vegetables that were on the list, then a deconstructed pasta dish that included gluten-free lasagne sheets and buckwheat, and a lemon tart made with gluten-free flour. Lola II had told me to remember to take pictures, which I remembered just as the last mouthful of the lemon tart was being savoured (it really was a good one). So it went entirely unrecorded for posterity.

The next cooking event was for the chap who hadn't managed to find Lola Towers the previous week and involved another three people too, and then the following evening I offered supper to another friend. And this weekend I've been away with two other friends, and we were cooking for one another again. Now I'm ready for a break from cooking.