I promised details of my other kitchen addiction in addition to my spice habit. So it’s confession time now – I can’t get enough Lock’n’lock boxes ! Since having all these lovely cupboards I keep all my ingredients in them, so I don’t have loose packets just waiting to tip over and deposit their contents on the floor/worksurface/cupboard interior. They are all neatly decanted into my airtight boxes and stored (dare I say it) in orderly areas – all nuts and seeds in one part, dried fruits in another, rice and pasta elsewhere .. it is a lovely feeling to be well organised but for those of you who know me well, it must be rather scary ! My work life has been well ordered for a long time, with things filed where I can find them and so forth, but my cooking life hasn’t been nearly as good.

And I am loving it. It means I can go into town and buy whatever meat or fish is there and inspires me, and know that I have the wherewithal to produce a meal without having to think about the added ingredients – I can come home with my lovely piece of halibut (yes, that’s on the menu tonight as a treat) and know that I can now go to my latest discovery of www.cooked.com and find a recipe that I can use and that I will have the rest of the bits I need safely in the cupboard or freezer.

For me this makes cooking such a pleasure … and having he storage space, especially with the utility room available so I can buy plenty of flour for my bread making, store my onions well away from any potatoes, squirrel away the large packs of catfood that make life so much easier when buying in bulk and (my family will laugh at me) keep plenty of spare loo rolls … they all know that I have a horror or running out of loo paper !

I now make all my own bread as a matter of course, and am really starting to get to grips with the new oven – it’s actually very different from a normal fan oven (it calls itself 4D) but the latest batches of rolls and hot-cross buns have turned out well, as have the Victoria sponge and the lemon drizzle, though I confess that a batch of chocolate and marshmallow cookies were something of a disaster … the recipe said it made 12 and they should be put well apart on the tray. So my two biggest baking trays came out and I was very obedient – six on each. And it turned into one enormous flat biscuit on each tray ! I had to take a knife and cut them apart, and now they look like a large jigsaw puzzle for  3 year old. Mark says they taste OK but I am unconvinced. Maybe I weighed the flour wrong or something – it was a James Martin recipe and his are normally very good so I blame me and not him. Maybe I will stick with simpler ones in future !

So – there we go – confessions all round ! Spice addiction, lock’n’lock addiction and flat biscuits. Says it all really J

More of our lives anon …