With time on her hands, Herald writer Rosemary Goring decided to make a quiche. Would it go right this time?

Of all the words that could be used to describe me, Masterchef is not among them. My husband once described my relationship to cooking as like Donald Trump’s to truth: at best unreliable, at worst divorced from reality. Too often I have set out to follow a delicious-sounding recipe to discover that, as it emerges from the oven, it bears no resemblance to the photo in the book, sometimes alarmingly far from it. As I watch people heroically consuming it, or take pity and scrape it into the bin – the kitchen meantime looking as if a bomb has detonated – I vow, yet again, to lock away the cookery books and stick to boiled eggs.

It's been this way for as long as I can remember. On entering a kitchen my concentration turns to mince. I discover things I’ve forgotten to do at the other end of the house and, on returning – not always before the smoke detector alerts me – find pans burnt black or food turned to tungsten. There was one occasion when the pasta boiled dry and tasted of smoke. Reader, I ate it.

At this time of year, the stress of cooking and entertaining is extreme. Where ordinary mortals are concerned, if Christmas and New Year’s day lunches were cancelled the country’s collective blood pressure would exponentially drop. Surely that would do the NHS a service?

Read more by Rosemary Goring........

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