Rolling Rolling Rolling!

There's a bandwagon in town and I've jumped right on!

Cooking. I'd forgotten I'd learned to love this thing! OK it's early days and by tomorrow I might be saying "toast for tea!" but right now I'm fired up and cooking!

I haven't made the 3 bean chilli yet because I got distracted by the Curry booklet that came with the SW magazine. So yesterday I went to Sainsbury's and loaded my trolley with every conceivable spice, went home and made Quorn curry. OK the recipe was for chicken curry but since I don't do red days and need a load of carbs before I feel like I've eaten it had to be Quorn. I was nervous. Very nervous. I wasn't at all sure how this wild combination of spices could end well. In fact I wondered if it might be better eaten at the end of a night out with a pint of lager! But you know what? It was bloody gorgeous! If I had any Quorn in I would have made it again tonight! I have never made any kind of curry from scratch before because long lists of ingredients scare me quite a lot! But this long list was just all the spices.

As I type there is a pan of carrot and lentil soup simmering on the stove. There's a bit of improvisation in this recipe since I didn't have all the ingredients, but I can't see why it wouldn't work out just fine.

Did anyone watch Jamie Oliver's new programme - Ministry of Food? I wish someone like him had come to Cheshire and taught me this stuff years ago. It's pretty shocking seeing how badly people eat, and feed their kids. It made me stop and wonder why I didn't really have great cooking skills, since my mum was actually a pretty fine cook in her day. The reason is this: she used to make it seem horribly hard work. She'd be hot, bothered, stressed. She'd be in the kitchen for hours, and dishes I now know are pretty simple would seem to require a bewildering array of pots and pans and complicated processes (she used to leave the shepherds pie outside for some reason!) Certainly she never wanted her kids under her feet trying to learn how to cook. So I grew up with the idea that being in a kitchen was a form of hell. Therefore I consider it my duty to make my daughter think cooking is fun, and to this end she has just peeled and chopped all the carrots for the soup, and she helped me with all the spices for the curry.

Yes, that's it, I'm facilitating her learning. Not using her as slave labour at all ;)