The kitchen is no longer my patch, but I’m not making a meal of it

Somehow, I have lost the kitchen. For 25 years and almost 10,000 dinners, it was my space, my manor, my patch. Other people only cooked there on the rare occasions when I wasn’t around or on the even less frequent occasions when some sort of wild inspiration struck somebody. I cooked Christmas dinner there for eight people six days after having a baby. Another Christmas, I cooked the dinner with a surgical boot on my foot. The drawer containing the kitchen utensils is arranged in an order that is logical only to me. I am the only one who knows which herbs and spices we have without having to check.

But the times they are a changing, as Bob Dylan once sang of his own kitchen arrangements. It started with The Small Girl and her long-running half-hearted attempts to go vegan. Initially — and not least because it takes her an age to cook anything — I suggested she cook her food after I’d finished cooking for the rest of us; a development that frequently saw her sitting down to eat at 10pm. Then The Youngest decided she also would like to be ‘as meat free as possible’ — you have to admire my daughters’ watery commitment to the cause — and so The Small Girl began to include her sister in her culinary plans. Then their Dad discovered an interest in kimchi which, for those who haven’t had the misfortune, is a dish of Korean fermented vegetables that smells like somebody who’s just completed a marathon and instead of hitting the shower, decides to sit in a basin of vinegar for an hour. And since I literally cannot be in the kitchen with that heady aroma, that was him largely out of my dinner plans as well. After that, The Boy got a full time job which has allowed him to pursue his lifelong ambition of eating spice bags every day.

There followed an awkward transition during which I kept being left with too much cooked food and not enough mouths to eat it. Because I can’t abide food waste, this meant that I ended up eating the same dish for days on end, basically working my way through everyone else’s unwanted dinners. Then there were two days in a row when I went to the fridge and discovered that the kids had eaten what I had planned to have for my own dinner. Advised by The Boy to ‘label my food’ and faced with eating tinned sardines for the third evening in a week, I decided it was time for a change. From now on, I told the four hungry mouths I’ve been filling for 25 years, I would only cook dinners if requested in advance. Otherwise, they’re on their own. Or in the case of The Boy, in the company of the local Chinese takeaway.

Like all regime changes, it hasn’t been a smooth transition. When The Boy announced he would cook his famous seafood linguine (literally, the only dish in his repertoire that doesn’t come in a plastic tray) for his girlfriend, he demanded that the rest of us clear the kitchen for the four hours it would take to cook and eat the meal. Since that would have involved the rest of us going hungry, I had to impose a rule that allows for everyone to get a fair run at the hob. I have been less successful in passing a law that requires all the cooks to clean up after themselves. On Mother’s Day, I played sous chef to The Small Girl and The Boy (The Youngest being confined to quarters with Covid) because the dinner I’d requested is technically quite demanding. Still, they did the lion’s share of the work and afterwards, while they basked in their culinary success, I scraped the plates and loaded the dishwasher because I am a mother and therefore an eejit.

But slowly and surely we’re getting there. After too many evenings of hovering around them issuing instructions about which oil, which pan, which utensil and YOU CAN’T PUT THAT IN THE DISHWASHER — I am gradually managing to avert my eyes and my attention while they find their own way around the kitchen. And while I always enjoyed cooking, to my great surprise, I’m finding that I don’t miss the daily grind of creating a menu and a meal.

Of course, I’m still cooking about half the time so there’s not much chance of me suffering serious withdrawal pangs. As to labelling my food, as I explained to The Boy, I am 55, not 25. And it’s my kitchen.

Even if I’m no longer constantly in it, it will always be my kitchen.