The pandemic has not been all bad for foodie Richard Alsop: he’s eaten a healthy diet, set up an online food platform ‘Quarantine Cuisine’ and, most of all, watched his daughter go from a baby to a toddler!
WHEN the prime minister announced the official lockdown in March, nobody really knew exactly what impact that would have, especially when it came to the pursestrings. At the time the first lockdown started, our daughter Lena was just under four months old and, as any parent will know, we were already in a heightened sense of protectiveness. My wife Laura and I run Edge Events, a company specialising in organising outdoor food and drink festivals. Stating the obvious, the pandemic has financially crippled our business. We had to find new and creative ways to help cushion the dent in our household income, as all our 2020 events were cancelled. My wife was still on maternity leave and she did have her hands full with our little one, but that was going to change by summertime. To keep ourselves busy, we built a greenhouse and created a vegetable patch in our garden, which yielded great results and saved us a few quid while money was sparse. One of the other positive changes we made was to bulk buy fresh food so we could batch cook tasty, healthy meals in large quantities, then freeze the food to enjoy at a later date. We are extremely fortunate to have a good-sized freezer, so it was an obvious thing to do…