Blue Monday Beans

why is this so nineties I DON'T KNOW I just believe it is!

Here’s the pitch for this one: Bridget Jones does Spanish cowboy for Blue Monday.

I mean! Come on!

I think you will love it, actually, because I do: a deep cosy bowl of niceness that takes 1 pot only, and requires absolutely minimal skills. Crispy sausages! Beans falling apart! Lively little olives! Plus olive oil! Smoky paprika! Sweet onions! Chicken stock! That is, actually, all the ingredients I have just listed for you. It is so cosy. It is so wholesome. It is, to me, giving nineties dinner party, I think because of the olives? Maybe also the smoked paprika?

For this to work you truly need to be picturing Bridget Jones’ flat, right, the one from the first book, the 1996 book, and you have to imagine that Mark Darcy has come over and taken over and made this instead of whatever she was going to make. Whatever Bridget was going to make was chaos; what Mark is going to make is something wholesome and good out of the ingredients available to him in the fridge and possibly the corner shop. I seek to think about that bit, that whole Bridget Jones-y Richard Curtis-y vibe, whenever I am teetering into a depression. It’s just helpful to think about it! It’s helpful to think about someone coming to help you!

It may be relevant, here, that my other coping mechanism— apart from cooking and thinking about Bridget Jones— is reading romance novels. And listen: is it relevant that I have read eleven cowboy romance novels in the last two weeks? It feels like it might be. Given the beans-and-sausage cowboy of it all. Given the everything of it all. Given the Blue Monday of it all.