Getting Covid over summer has rattled Nici Wickes in a way she didn’t expect.
For the past few months, the beloved cookbook author has battled with losing her enthusiasm for cooking – which is big for someone for whom cooking is her first love and whose superpower is whipping up delicious meals from a handful of basic ingredients.
“I didn’t lose my taste or sense of smell, or my actual appetite, but I lost my appetite for thinking about food and cooking. It just completely left me and I’m still coaxing it back,” Wickes admits. “Often people say to me ‘I can never think of what to cook for dinner’ and I’ve been a bit the same. That’s been really new for me and an interesting insight. I’m getting a window into people who do not live for food, as I live for food and cooking.”
Her cooking malady has lasted about four months, which Wickes believes was physiological. And because cooking is such a joyful thing for Wickes it took her a while to realise why she felt a bit flat over summer.
Instead of giving into it, she’s taken action to reclaim her cooking mojo by reading food literature, watching food programmes on the telly and just doing it. “Cooking is a little bit like a muscle, you have to exercise it,” she explains. “It’s like fitness. You get fit and then you fall out of it, and then you have to kind of start from the beginning again.”
Coming out the other side, she acknowledges that while it has been huge for her, she is grateful to have experienced this major shift in herself and for being challenged. “It’s not comfortable to think, ‘wow, what if my love of cooking doesn’t come back, what am I going to do? Okay, interesting’. Then Cyclone Gabrielle came through and I wasn’t able to swim daily – which is another big thing for me. So, I was being challenged with these things that usually keep me buoyant.”
Instead, Wickes
