I’m not the best cook in the world, and not the most imaginative if I’m honest, but I can cook a meat and two veg type of dinner and do quite a nice line in salads.

Sometimes when I’m in the kitchen everything seems really in control and the dinner all cooks to perfection and in the right time. Sometimes, however, it doesn’t go that well. Am I the only one?

Take tonight for example. Very simple meal, chicken chasseur (sauce courtesy of Homepride) with mashed potatoes, carrots, peas and broccoli.

I’d cooked the chicken, added the sauce on the hob, put the potatoes on and put the steamer on to cook the other veg (one of my hobs isn’t working so I have to be creative).

As the carrots obviously take longer than the broccoli, I gave them 10 minutes start. At the appropriate time I checked the carrots to find that I hadn’t put the hob on under the steamer after all and the carrots were stone cold.

I hastily put them on, putting boiling water in the steamer to help quicken the process and when I went to the fridge to get the broccoli out to prepare I realised that I hadn’t actually bought any!!

The other night I had decided to do chicken in a different sauce (we like chicken okay!). Different veg this time to make it more interesting.

I’m really fussy with chicken and cut every bit of fat and yuk off, so after defrosting it I realised I didn’t like the look of it. By the time I’d have finished cutting out all the bits I don’t like we wouldn’t have had any meat.

Okay, so how could I turn the meal into something else with no chance to get more meat. I could still have the mashed potatoes and carrots. I could make a cheese sauce for the cauliflower and in the freezer I had some chicken dippers. Not what I really fancied, but it would do.

Well I couldn’t find my normal recipe for the cheese sauce so I used a different cookbook, big mistake. Not only did it only make half the normal quantity, it became so lumpy I had to sieve it over the cauliflower. As time was running out and the family were hungry I didn’t have time to make another batch, so I made it stretch. (I just took some of the cauliflower out of the dish.)

So my lovely chicken in a sauce dinner became ‘chicken hotch potch’ with ‘cauliflower almost cheese’.

Surprisingly the family were happy with the meal but I’m not sure if that’s because they were so hungry they were too weak to complain or I am such a rotten cook they thought it was just the normal standard!