My friends think I’m completely bonkers at the moment – I keep inviting myself over for dinner and commandeering their kitchen to make the meal myself.

I’m literally going stir crazy here in the cottage with a dodgy cooker out in ‘the shed’ – a delightful, mundic-ridden (don’t ask) add on to the back of our cottage and no proper kitchen. Each night, when I switch on the oven, I have to check inside it first to make sure there are no slugs in it – how they get in I don’t know. The kitchen units are in but there is no work surface on much of it because it can’t be fitted till the new (old) cooker is here…..which I’m pleased to report will be in a fortnight’s time. The table is now home to our PCs and monitor so I can’t prep food there.

So, I’m plaguing Alan and Dee as well as Becks and Iain to allow us to eat at their place and to let me do some cooking in comfort and space. At the weekend, we went to Alan and Dee’s where I cooked them supper for the second time in their own kitchen. I’ve done it twice at Becks and Iain’s too. On Saturday, the menu was goats cheese and pesto tartlets, followed by sun-dried tomato and mushroom risotto. It went down well!

Dee bought me this beautiful oil to thank me – rosemary and juniper infused. Yum. I liked the shape of the bottle and its contents so here it is. Becks too has bought me beautiful bottles of infused oils to thank me – they both have got me ‘right’ if you know what I mean.

The thing is, reason to be proud no 6 can be encapsulated by Alan, who commented while there were mushrooms and onions and tomatoes piled up on his chopping board ‘we never cook like this, from ingredients’. That’s what I’m proud of. We eat a proper meal each night, cooked from scratch and with raw ingredients. Every day. It’s my little obsession and I’m dead proud of it. When we sit down to eat, our food isn’t full of chemicals and strangely modified stuff. It’s just good and wholesome and often contains ingredients we’ve made ourselves, like our fresh eggs and our veggies. Not that there are any home-grown veggies at the moment – but there will be again next year!

Two years ago, I was ranting about the death of music and last year, I was loving my moon gazing hare.