1. 14 Weeks In...

8.30am:
I’m holding my 14 week-old son in one hand whilst blocking out a plan to cook dinner for friends coming round in the evening. My partner is not feeling well, so is in bed for a second sleep. It is – relatively, for me – a simple menu. Snacks over drinks whilst they sit at the counter will be parathas with a curry leaf butter, and some okra fries. Then we’ll move to the table for kitchari, a squash curry and some fried prawns. Two things to fry right before we eat, but everything else done in advance. This is my new version of hosting, adapted for life with a newborn, doubling down even more on pre-prep. I have the plan. A dozen steps. He’s asleep. I put him down in a bassinet in the kitchen.

9.00am:
Life has been a little chaotic so I start with a quick kitchen clean.

9.10am:
He’s crying so I pick him up and hold him. He fusses a bit. Squirms, and then falls asleep. I make a tentative move to get up off the stool. Wide awake and puckering his face as he prepares to unleash a wail. Back into the seat.

9.40am:
After ten minutes of deep sleep I make the move again and he doesn’t stir. I get him down in the bassinet. I deal with the squash – portion it, and skin it. I know it’s not mandatory to remove the peel but it can be bitter and I don’t want that note in the curry. 

9.50am:
A succession of coughs, each like cranking up a flywheel ready to let rip a big cry, so I pick him up. He’s wide awake and curious so I try him in his bouncer chair where he can see the action, and I give him the running commentary as I finish cutting the squash and get it into the oven. I feel like I’m watching a grenade with the pin out, but so far so good, and I make the magic masala to go on the okra fries. I fish some ginger and garlic paste from the freezer, but decide its not enough and make some more. I keep up the chat…

10.20am:
He’s fast asleep in his bouncer. This is my moment and I slice and fry onions. I’m working through the list but feeling like that grenade might detonate at any moment so I rationalise the menu by taking off the date and tamarind chutney to go with the curry and instead I’ll pimp up some OK mango chutney in the fridge. A bit of chilli powder, some tamarind paste and it’s tasting good. Strong hack.

10.40am:
He wakes with the unmistakable cry of hunger. The onions are only 90% of where I want them to be, so they come off the heat. I feed him and with the last few sips he falls deeply asleep on me, and that’s me away from the stove for at least the next hour. This should have been a ninety minute cook to get all pre-prep done, but I’ve been wildly optimistic about the timing of each element in the plan as well as how much focused time I’ll get.

Let me rewind.

This is my first child. I’m starting family life later than most – some of my friends from university have kids starting university in the same September where we’re dealing with the three hour feed cycle of a newborn.

There are advantages to the late start. I’ve had a decent career and arrived at the point where I needed a break. A patchy track record in starting businesses had enough success to cover some time off to focus on becoming a dad. I’m ten years into a wonderful relationship. We recently moved to a house we bought together. I’m in the fortunate place of being able to focus on family rather than timeshare kids and career.

In this blessed position, we spend much of the pregnancy talking about what excites us and what we each need to stay sane and happy through the experience. Two things, I say: I can still follow Arsenal, with all games on TV and the occasional one in person. And most important: we continue to eat great food.

Great food and drink. My obsession since a young age, and the love language between me and my partner. The thing that occupies most of my free time, anchors holidays and for over a decade provided my livelihood too. Eating, drinking, but also sourcing and cooking. The pleasure of cooking for others – from the grand scale of community centre lunches to the daily rhythms of our home kitchen. And as the decades pass, the visceral, emotional pleasure of food is matched by an understanding of how much food – rather than exercise or any type of wellness – determines health and how I feel.

So if there was any element of fear about becoming a father, it was about compromising our food life. It was there as I cooked meals across the heatwave spring and summer of 2025, the succession of guests providing a countdown to the due date.  “I hope you’re getting this out of your system,” someone would say as I served them a tart of roasted tomatoes on a polenta base topped with amchur and parmesan. “You won’t be able to do this when the baby arrives,” said with a laugh as I serve up a scallop chawanamushi topped with sakura shrimp.

“Why not?”, I’d say, joining the laughter. Internally: “Just you watch me. The kid will sleep, right?”. And on the positive side, there’s the excitement of a new mouth to feed. The challenge of raising an adventurous and social eater. My food awareness started in the 80s. A French Stick – bearing nothing in common with a baguette other than being long and thin – from Safeway was exciting. Olive oil lived mainly in the chemist. My first taste of Thai food came at University, Japanese food not until my early 20s. Decent Mexican not until my 30s. If our childhood traumas shape us as parents, the traumatic limitation in my childhood diet is for sure going to shape how I feed our son. I know that food preferences are as much as expression of agency as anything else, and this may be a battle I lose, but I’m so excited to wage it. 

I’m less worried about the hit to eating out. I understand the reasons behind restaurant pricing, but too often the food is below the level we cook at home, and the place lacking in the magic of hospitality that I’ll always be happy to pay for. The great thing about cooking being your main hobby, and for the past few years working mostly from home, is you eat well. Sauces are made from scratch. The freezer is full of ingredients like galangal, chicken stock, wild garlic butter, spring roll pastry, cherry ice cream, the base for mapo tofu and roasted tomato sauce. We shop mostly from the local farmers market and dive deep into Ranya and Hilal, Kilburn High Road’s two world food emporiums. Days out are spent going to Wing Yip for dim sum and stock up, or planning routes home via the Japanese store Natural Natural, a branch of Tian Tian market, Garcia for Spanish ingredients, or the Thai food store near Westbourne Grove. The cupboards hold ingredients brought back from Japan, Mauritius, California and India

The time dedicated to sourcing and cooking, eating and hosting, has always been huge. It’s this that fatherhood threatens given our intention to share parenting equally.

Back in the kitchen, I hand the baby off to his mama, and we trade him back and forth over the next few hours as I deal with some life and work admin. I get fully back to the kitchen at 5.15pm, finish off the curry sauce and add the squash. I mix rice and gram flours, spices and finely shredded curry leaves to become the batter for the prawns and mix them in it. I take the onions further to the desired level of brown, and combine with dal and rice to make the kitchari. Okra is washed and sliced, coated with garlic and ginger pastes with a little chilli powder. More curry leaves infuse some butter with a touch of curry powder, which is then strained and left to cool to a spreadable solidity. At 6.40pm our friends arrive as I’m finishing off a coriander chutney and some garlic yoghurt. 

They’re meeting our baby for the first time and most attention is rightly on him. I cook parathas from the freezer – even in pre-baby times I’ve only attempted to make them once, with results so inferior to the frozen version that they went straight on the short-ish list of things to buy rather than make. The curry leaf butter is the star of the show. The okra is tossed with cornflour and gram flour and quickly fried, served with the chutneys. We eat these snacks at the counter, passing the baby around – us desperate for tales of life outside the bubble, them keen to know how our world has changed. I have my one pour of wine and then keep our guests topped up, conscious that I don’t want to feel any trace by the time I’m waking up for night feeds and changes in a few hours.

We move to the table for the kitchari, and squash curry, and I fry the prawns, and we eat.

There’s a few ways you can judge the food and the menu.

From an eating perspective: snack course was great. Moreish, different, great flavours to set the scene. Main course was just OK. I think a biryani would be a better centrepiece. Or else with this menu it needed a couple more dishes to fill the table.

From an easy-prep perspective: this was way too complex for a day when I’m going to be doing a big chunk of childcare. Wildly over optimistic in how much time he will not be attached to me, sleeping or otherwise. Frying snacks whilst guests are here was pretty quick and easy, but massively added time to the cleanup effort.

From a cooking perspective: fun variety of tasks, decent ratio of time to output.

This is only the third time we’ve hosted guests since his birth. There’s so much that we’re still figuring out – as we build confidence in the basics of keeping him alive we’re starting to work out how we shape our new family life… what will change and what we can continue from our past life. By the time we’ve finished eating, he’s fast asleep on me. Our guests leave. We prepare the night feeds and his mama takes him up to try and get him asleep in his cot while I clear up before collapsing into bed for a few hours sleep, pleased with another tentative step into our new family life.