I was tired and a bit overworked, and that’s when it happened: the lid fell off the jar at the wrong moment, and all was lost. Or was it? For a long, despondent minute, I considered the disaster before me. In my best Le Creuset pan on the top of the oven were the sausages I was turning into a pasta sauce for dinner, and about 10 times the amount of chilli flakes I’d intended to add. Oh no! Thoughts of takeaway pizza floated into my mind. But I hated to waste both the sausages and my efforts up to this point, so I decided to plough on regardless. Some like it hot, and we two are among them. How bad could it be, really?
The answer is: not bad at all. I might not have fed it to guests, but we both ended up having seconds. It was … memorable, I guess, and later on, as I loaded the dishwasher and worried vaguely about what I might cook tomorrow in this, the busiest and craziest of weeks, I got to thinking about kindness in the kitchen – kindness to myself, in this instance. Don’t worry. I’m not about to turn into some gruesome self-help guru. All I mean is that, sometimes, I should give myself a break. In fact, we all should. If perfection is elusive, equally, seeming catastrophe is rarely that. Most dishes can be salvaged. Nearly everything is edible, in extremis. Delia Smith – Delia bloody Smith! – loved the cake I panic-baked for her when I interviewed her last year. It hadn’t risen properly. As I took it out of my bag, it resembled nothing so much as a house brick wrapped in foil. But as I heard later – she said this to her audience during an event at Conway Hall in London, and some of them were kind enough to email me afterwards – she and Michael, her husband, devoured every last cardamom-scented crumb.
