Hell's Kitchen (and how to avoid it)

I don't know if this happens to anyone else but hot weather kills my appetite stone dead. Then after eating next-to-nothing all day I wonder where all my energy has gone (well Duh!, as a passing American would say). If it's difficult to eat, it's even harder to cook, so what's been happening in the Lunchista kitchen of late, and more to the point where have all the lunch ideas gone? Some of us are getting quite hungry out here!

This is what we do in hot weather. In fact, in 2003 when it was ludicrously hot for a ridiculous length of time, we carried on like this for weeks. A family from the Continent were staying so there were eight of us altogether, which made for a great atmosphere.

We have an ancient wooden dining table (the sort that folds down so it hardly takes up any room when not in use) that we bought from somebody's garage for a tenner. We sanded it down and varnished it with "does exactly what it says on the tin", making it almost completely resistant to food stains, burns, and the English summer weather. If sanding isn't your bag, the alternative is a couple of yards of wipe-clean plastic to use as a tablecloth. Thus protected, the table stayed outside all summer, making every meal a delightful garden experience. Anything that fell off it onto the lawn neither broke nor needed sweeping up. Heaven.

We made salads. Not limp lettuce and quartered tomatoes with a bit of salad cream type salad: this is hard-core. First, for the meal's energy, salad spuds with parsley and chives from the garden, plus dill pickles and yoghurt. Then a dish for protein, bean salad (a cupful of blackeye beans tipped into the water in which you've just boiled your breakfast egg, and left there to soak, will only need cooking for 20 minutes or so before lunch), then add, well, anything: peppers, tomatoes, sweetcorn, nuts...

And one for colour: grated beetroot and feta cheese (half-and-half) with some walnuts.

We found lettuce tastes a lot less limp if it just has lemon juice on it. And Lunchista has discovered that strawberries go really well with Wensleydale.

Finally, glasses of wine, and a huge jug of lemonade (thank you, The Homely Year, because I didn't have the presence of mind to get a photo of ours...), or just water with lemon slices in it: Lunchista can't drink just wine in that heat. Some people keep boxes of sliced lemon in the freezer for emergencies.

It is a curious fact of life that people will have better apetites if presented with lots of different dishes and just left to get on with it while chatting, than if there's just one heavy course. Some of our lunches, with the addition of tea and cakes, lasted through until the early evening. By which time the weather had cooled down enough to get the barbeque out...

"So, what do you do?"

For those who have set out on a year-long lunch break (or indeed a lunch-break of any longer than about two days) this question is a minefield, cunningly disguised behind a plate of something rather nice, being proffered in your direction by someone who, and this is the master-stroke, is otherwise perfectly friendly and pleasant. In a previous recession I happened to be at a party in which nearly everyone I asked, replied in the past tense: "I was a (fill in incomprehensible job title in the finance industry here)". After three or four of these it became evident that it was much more fun to ask people if they were into Heavy Metal.

But supposing that, rather than being at a party, you find yourself catapulted into fame in the local paper, by some random misfortune like a gas explosion, or by coming first in the local fun-run or winning the lottery. How is the reporter going to describe you?

If you've just finished studies, this is dead easy: An (insert interesting topic here) graduate. Perhaps this is why gap-years are usually done at this time in life. At the other end of the scale, if you know you've finished with the wonderful world of work for good you are of course a retired (insert fascinating career choice here). However to pull off this stunt you need to look reassuringly old and wise: this is not a popular tactic with about 51% of the population. But what if you have just lost your job? Or supposing you left it because it was unbearable, unethical, or you just couldn’t face another day working for an enterprise whose management, in their wisdom, had seen fit to re-brand it “WIMP” because it made it sound more Client-Focussed? Will our newspaper reporter be happy with the answer: "I'm a Heavy Metal fan", or indeed with information about any other activity, no matter how fascinating or unusual? Well, no. The guy wants to know your profession, because the means by which you acquire money, for some reason, is supposed to reveal something deep and meaningful about the real you.

Of course in most cases this is a pile of tosh. The vast majority of jobs (really, apart from Doctors and Lawyers, who has a profession these days?) are far too boring to reveal anything at all about the type of people who do them. What's more, recent research has revealed that three quarters of working people in the UK are in occupations which are completely incompatible with their type of character.

This means our reporter might as well describe you using your star sign. This may or may not tell their readers more about you than the epithet "unemployed". But sadly, "unemployed" it will be.

Unless, of course, you have a Plan.

First, the party line (or the paper epithet) is "I gave up my boring/stressful/unethical/too-far-away job to go and do Y"

Central to the plan is a "Y".

And that is what The Year-Long Lunch Break is all about.