Food and Eating Habits

I'd like to talk about a dinner from about three years ago, when I'd just moved to a new city for work and was living away from my family for the first time. It was my birthday, which fell on a Tuesday that year, and I'd quietly decided to ignore it because I barely knew anyone there. I was sharing a flat with two people I'd met only a few weeks earlier — Dana, who worked at a bakery, and Marcus, a nursing student. Without telling me, they'd planned a whole evening. When I got home from work, the kitchen table had been dragged into the living room and laid properly, with candles and completely mismatched plates. The food was a strange and brilliant mix. Dana had made a slow-cooked chicken stew with apricots and lemon — her grandmother's recipe — along with bread from her bakery that was still warm. Marcus contributed an enormous tray of roasted vegetables and a chocolate cake that had sunk in the middle, which he insisted was intentional. We drank cheap sparkling wine out of water glasses because we didn't own proper ones, and we sat there talking until well past midnight. What made it memorable wasn't really the cooking, though the stew really was lovely. It was the realisation, at some point during the evening, that I'd stopped feeling like a stranger in that city. Two people who hardly knew me had spent their whole evening making me feel at home, and that meal marked the exact moment a rented flat started to feel like a place I belonged. The three of us still recreate it every single year.