It is a sort of Ready Steady Cook round mine of an evening when I open fridge door, scan ingredients lurking within, and come up with a cunning culinary concoction.

And, if I do say so myself, I can whizz up a passable repast out of what on the face of it looks remarkably like thin air, or getting that way, anyway, by the end of the week.

Give me a stalk of broccoli, a cold sausage and handful of rice and I can rustle up a meal for four no problem, albeit of the sort of fare my husband likes to disparagingly call 'peasant food'.

This, I believe, would be my gift to a post-oil world. Delicious, nutritious feasts such as nuts and berries hotpot and the like.

The problem is though, because I don't really work from cookbooks, I don't really have recipes in my repertoire.

So, my sons are never going to say 'my mum cooks a mean Thai green chicken curry, or chilli' because I don't really. I may come up with a chilli or curry type thingy if the ingredients offer themselves, but it won't be the authentic version.

And when friends announce they are going to, say, make a Moroccan chicken tangine with coconut cous-cous followed by strawberry pavlova that evening, I am genuinely perplexed and impressed.

I mean, how can they be that organised to a) know if they have all ingredients for said dish and b) actually know what they are going to cook that night, and every other night?

Meanwhile, I am looking forward to getting my domestic brain around a lump of cheese, a boiled beetroot and a tin of tomatoes.



* Why is it, and this is one of life's little annoyances that I get less and less tolerant of, muttering 'typical' under my breath whenever it happens, which is very regularly indeed (phew), that whenever you start to reverse out of a parking space, someone parks right beside you that minute, and whenever you are coming back to your car with shopping, someone starts reversing out right beside it. It is uncanny, is it not?

Or it is just me?

sue.gilson@chiobserver.co.uk


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