Do you ever have one of those days where you are dishing up the dinner and you realise you’ve forgotten something vital? I do….well, in truth, I do fairly regularly….and that’s even when I have all the ingredients I need for my intended dish in the cupboard at the start of the exercise.

There are many occasions when I am half-way through making a dish when I realise that I’m missing something really important. Something that sets the dish alight with flavour. Oh yes, this happens to me a lot! I realise this probably doesn’t fill anyone with bucketloads of confidence about my cooking skills but I promised honesty not some glossy exterior with a caricature of a perfect housewife.

Tonight is one of the nights when I was serving up supper – wholegrain basmati rice already served and my first ladle full of chilli piled onto the plate and I kept thinking ‘this doesn’t look right’ and ‘what’s missing?’

Bingo, I realised what should have been there but was not…..and yep, you’ve guessed it, kidney beans! I reckon they’re pretty vital in a chilli – let’s face it, a chilli isn’t a proper chilli without beans!!!

So, the chilli was scooped back into the pan and the beans added and heated through. Phew – I got away with it! Just.

It got me thinking – I wonder how many wonderful dishes have been created by a cook forgetting they needed say, kidney beans then looked around in the cupboard for a substitute and found, say, butter beans and bob’s your uncle (well, he is mine anyway) and a stunning new dish was borne?

Maybe this has happened many times before but I hasten to report not tonight. Tonight, the ‘right’ ingredient eventually found its way into my chilli and the resulting chilli was sooooooo good(!) that the double quantity that I’d prepared so some could be consumed in a jacket spud tomorrow lunchtime disappeared into DMs tummy before you could say ‘red kidney beans, in water with sugar and salt added’.

On another note…..why can’t you buy sugar and salt free beans in small tins? It gets my goat. When I’m a lady of leisure, I’ll cook all my own beans from dried but until then I want the ‘healthy stuff’ in small packs.

Two years ago today, DM collected his baby - the Lurker from Luke....and in another one of either those bizarre twists of fate or maybe just a demonstration of what a creature of habit I am, I was photographing chilli last year!!!