Recipe of the Month – February

Warming Dijon Chicken Barley

Ingredients:
1 small leek, or a couple of shallots, finely sliced
1 medium carrot, peeled and cut into chunks
1 parsnip, peeled and cored, and cut into chunks
50g pearl barley
2 or 3 chicken thighs, bone-in, skin off
2 heaped tsp Dijon mustard
500ml hot chicken stock (from a cube or pot is fine)
Sprig fresh parsley, roughly chopped
Salt and pepper to season

Method
1. Put the prepared vegetables into a heavy-based pan with a lid, then add
the barley and the chicken thighs.
2. Mix the mustard with the stock and add it to the vegetables and
chicken and bring it to a steady boil. As froth begins to gather on top,
skim this off.
3. Add the lid to the pan, but don’t cover completely, turn
down the heat and simmer for about 90 minutes. Check it every so
often. If it looks like it’s boiling dry, add some hot water.
4. Once the barley, chicken and vegetables are cooked and most of the
liquid has been absorbed, remove the lid from the pan and the pan
from the heat. Let it stand for about 10 minutes.
5. Remove the chicken thighs from the pot. Using a fork take the meat
off the bones and return the meat to the dish. Add the parsley, and
season with salt and pepper.
Simon Says
You can use a small chicken breast if you prefer white meat over dark,
but you would chop it up into bite-size chunks and add
halfway through the cooking time instead of at the beginning.
You can also use any leftover cooked meat, adding this for the last ten
minutes of cooking. The core of older parsnips can be quite hard and
woody so should be cut out prior to cooking. Younger smaller parsnips
aren’t usually such a problem.

Cooking for One – a collection of recipes and stories written by the bereaved offering wisdom, insight, love and hope.

Cooking for One contains no platitudes about what a great healer time can be, it is a candid account of the raw pain and utter loneliness that grief can bring about. Those who have opened up about their grief have told it as it really is, not what they think people want to hear. They tell you what has helped and the lessons that they have learned along the way.

So, as well as containing delicious recipes, Cooking for One aims to serve as a personal handbook designed to help the bereaved navigate their personal pathway of grief. Despite people telling them that they ‘really ought to be getting over the worst of it by now’ – and however much they appear to be outwardly coping – perhaps the pain will never fully fade and nor would they wish it to.

Cally’s Story

I’ve always loved cooking and it’s how I show love for my friends and family. Family have always been thin on the ground, but thinking back to when I lost my darling father and mother, I thought about what I might want to eat – food that’s soothing, simple to put together, nutritious, tasty and comforting. So here is my offering.

I struggled with the contradiction of eating well in the aftermath of bereavement – I associate food with joy and love, so eating well and enjoying food seemed almost disloyal and somehow wrong. But we are so shattered by grief, our bodies coping with the trauma of it all, that to feed ourselves well at this time is so very important.

I remember when my father died. Despite being an accomplished cook, I struggled to feed my mother and myself well in the immediate aftermath; it didn’t help that I was living abroad at the time. So, cooking in someone else’s kitchen (my mum’s) and from someone else’s store cupboard, was difficult. I wish I’d had this recipe to fall back on.

This recipe is my ‘go-to’ for when I want something tasty, comforting and delicious but also healthy. It doesn’t leave me feeling ‘stodged up and weighed down’. It doesn’t create heaps of washing up (it’s a one-pot meal, essentially), and it can be eaten with a spoon when you’re curled up on a sofa, ideally with a pet close by for comfort.

You can switch the veg around if it suits – swede or butternut squash work well, and some celery wouldn’t be out of place, if that’s what you want. You could make it more Mediterranean with sweet red peppers or courgettes, although these will cook down to be quite mushy, so maybe add them halfway through the cooking time.

Everyone grieves in their own way. There is no prescribed timetable. This is the most perfect advice for grief and loss I have found; it’s not mine, it’s unattributed, but it helped me when I was in a state of utter loss and desperation.

It’s the response of a gentleman who was asked, “My friend has just died, and I don’t know what to do.” Here’s the advice he offered:

Alright, here goes. I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not.

I’ve lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mum, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbours, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can’t imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here are my thoughts.

I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don’t want it to ‘not matter’. I don’t want it to be something that just passes.

My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was.

As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds
you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was – and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come ten seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function.

You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything – and the wave comes crashing. But in between the waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80ft tall. Or 50ft tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at an airport. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage; but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow, you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.

For information on Rosedale’s bereavement support group, please click here.