On cooking, baking - and custard creams

I've been thinking about food. Or, to be more accurate, I've been thinking about cooking and baking and how I feel about these activities - and about the fact that this morning I spent about an hour reading a recipe book. (I was given a pile of wonderful Ottolenghi books for Christmas; they're already full of paper markers and a list to tell me where exciting-looking things are.) It is perhaps a clue to my attitude that I then felt compelled to clean the bath - for a small inner voice told me that I'd been wasting time, sitting in my cosy living-room looking at the birds on the snowy feeder and reading about food. And cooking.

I love food. I'm what you would well call fussy, in that I like interesting and well-cooked food, and that there are things I body-swerve with increasing dedication: cream, fatty foods, shellfish, anything that will lie weightily in my digestive system long after I'd prefer to have forgotten about it. My mother, and now my sister, have long mocked my preference for green tea. But because I love good food, I try to produce same - and on the whole I would say I succeed. The creation on the right is one I recently enjoyed - venison fillet accompanied by freekeh pilaff and garlic yogurt - and I usually say that no-one who likes eating should be incapable of producing a decent meal.

But even after almost 44 years of being responsible for making the meals in my own home, I still feel it's not really me. I have the sense that I'm a sort of dilettante cook, playing at it without having acquired the basic skills or even the right equipment. Baking is even worse. My closest pal throws pastry together without a thought and uses it to entertain my grandchildren; she may never know (unless she reads this) how much awe I hold her in for this simple act. My Christmas cake is the best I've ever eaten, but since I stopped making children's birthday cakes it's the only cake I ever make - and more or less the only cake I eat, come to that.

So when I refer to myself as a Domestic Goddess, you should know that I do so in the spirit of deepest irony. Cooking - and the odd bit of baking - gets fitted in round the rest of my life even if the results are totally toothsome, and there's always this feeling that I'm in the same boat as the monkeys writing a Shakespeare play. Or something. My attitude to eating, I've decided, has hardened over the years. I shall never again, for example, eat a pizza - because you have to climb a Munro to use up the resulting calories. And I shall leave you with one final, devastating truth:

Life is too short to eat a custard cream.

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe ...

The kitchen is warm. No - it is actually unbearably hot. The erstwhile poet/musician, transformed for the nonce into Domestic Goddess, is hard at work. The oven is purring, for she has begun the day by roasting beetroot. There are still ominously red drips splattered over the white sink, as if Lady Macbeth had been washing her hands there, and sticky red blobs show where the cranberry sauce was poured, splashily, like a fine wine, into the warmed jars. (The DG was unhappy with the first batch, the cranberries having been over-long in the freezer, and has ditched it and made another lot.)

The heat is loaded with smells, individually rather wonderful, but together somewhat worrying. The burbling from the cooker-top indicates that it is time for the spiced prunes to come off the heat - star anise, honey smells - and it is time to find the preserving pan. Why, in the name of Christmas, the preserving pan? Well, the DG is very fussy about marmalade, and has just opened the last jar ... Ok, she uses tinned oranges, but there are a couple of red grapefruit to chop up (red again, and sticky) and careful calculations to be made about quantities of water, sugar ...

Why does she never write these things down? Why, indeed, did she not make the marmalade last week? Well may you ask. Could be the same penchant for distraction that has Mr B the musician back at the piano tinkering with an arrangement (don't ask) instead of getting to the church while it's still daylight for a spot of practice. He has already seduced the DG into running through a particularly challenging alto line (Tavener) for Midnight Mass - the other two singers are turning up tomorrow for the (only) rehearsal.

The DG finds herself thinking of Monty Python, as she shrieks at Mr B, currently in full composer/arranger/performer mode. 'Get up to the church!' (He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!) She tests the marmalade, which seems to wrinkle in a satisfactory fashion, slops it into more warmed jars, screws on the tops and leaves them to cool before attempting to wipe off the sticky bits. (More stickiness ...) The preserving pan is incandescent, and defiantly sticky. She fills it with hot suds and leaves it on the stove for when she feels stronger ... Oh God. The brandy butter ...

A friend asked me this morning how it came about that I felt I had so much to do when I was going away on Christmas Day. Quite apart from the fact that all I'm not cooking is the main course - and I always did that with a glass of champagne in my hand - I think part of the trouble is that just right now my head is full of poetry and music and I want to write and sing and .... and ....

Maybe I really need to be a student again. And 45 years younger.

But then I might have nothing to say.

Tempus fugit in corpore sano

I've been thinking about food today. Actually, I began by wondering where the morning had gone, and it was while I was making soup for lunch that the foodieness kicked in. T'other day I was checking out my messages (shopping, for the non-Glasgwegian) in the local Somerfield when it struck me forcibly how much I was spending. No booze, nothing fancy, one piece of pork fillet the only meat there - and it came to over £60. For two people. I stuck my credit card in the thingummy and commented that it hurt less than handing over cash.

'But you eat healthy food,' opined the youth who was serving me. I had taught him at some point in the past - a pleasant, polite sort of chap. 'It's expensive to be healthy.' I suppose he was looking at the veg and the "best ever" (or whatever) fruit, and the Tropicana juice and the soya milk - but he had a point. It's expensive not to buy the basic loss-leaders. It's expensive not to like the taste of Dutch hothouse tomatoes and to prefer Pink Lady apples. Expensive in money terms.

And in time terms - and this is where this all began - it's expensive to make your own soup (carrot & coriander, with onion, garlic and a wee bit of crushed chili and a sweet potato to improve the texture - about 20 minutes + cooking and blitzing time) and to prefer to make your own bread (I was making the starting 'sponge' which is now sitting in my pantry bubbling gently while it gathers flavour). Sometimes I use the machine and it takes only about 5 minutes to sling the stuff in, but sourdough takes longer, with the floury hands-on bit the time when someone is bound to phone you. Worth it, though - a great taste and texture.

But I digress. Where the time went this morning was partly on cooking, and partly on swimming. For the rest, I was seduced by a particularly enticing post on Kimberly's blog and spent an hour on the phone. But wanting to eat well and being a domestic goddess is clearly to blame for much of what I have left undone of what I ought to have done ... so is there indeed 'no health in me' after all?