Fairly often, it looks like this. I don't know about you, but our kitchen is often the barest of the bare. This necessitates drastic action, especially when shopping after work on bikes. The whole "you're limited to one backpack's worth of stuff" quandary doesn't exactly do much for stocking up on staples, which we always mean to but never actually do. Maybe we'll get one or two definite long-term things--rice, lentils, loose tea, more than one head of garlic--but we never seem to get enough.

This is not such a terrible thing. Even when we get home from work at 6:30 we can usually summon the energy to go up the street and get some cheese and bread and wine, and maybe apples. Then we come home in the dark and cut up the bread and arrange it with the cheese on a decent yet cheap wooden cutting board in desperate need of replacement. Then we sit at the table and read books and eat whatever comes to hand. Plenty of things come to hand in such a situation.

These particular cheeses are mimolette and cotswold. We like sharp, hard cheeses best, and so these are sharp, hard cheeses. Mimolette is a French hard aged cheese, with a sharp taste and flaky, er, texture--I initally put "crumb", but we aren't baking a cake here. Cotswold is British double Gloucester with chive and onion bits, so it's extra savory and strong as well as sharp. It's a good bit softer than the mimolette, but obviously not anything in the rich creamy vein. And then we have bread. Also books. Bread books cheese and wine. It is not cooking, but it is a pretty good dinner.