Being Me

'What are you cooking for dinner?' my daughter asked on the phone one evening last week.  'Mince,' I said.  'Savoury mince?' she said.  'Don't call it savoury mince,' I said. 'That makes it sound like something that you'd serve in an old people's home, or perhaps feed to a dog.' Awkward pause, then she said,  'You called it savoury mince all through my childhood.'  'I did?'  I nearly asked, 'And was it? Savoury?' But I dared not, because when my husband and I look back we realise that we subjected our three children to a wide range of poor cuisine as they grew up.  We overcooked meat, leaving roast chickens in the oven for hours until they'd have made credible weapons for hand to hand combat.  We overcooked fish, wrapping it in foil and baking it for so long that all moistness fled for its life and the white fish turned grey as though in despair at what had happened to it.  We overcooked vegetables so that

When the grandchildren came round last week, we made Welsh cakes.  Two years ago, we made them on holiday in Wales and they were so delicious that the children requested this repeat performance.  Unfortunately, the aspect of the performance that did not get repeated was that, in Wales, I didn't transform the cakes into slabs of inedible charcoal by frying them in a cheap, thin-bottomed pan.  Nevertheless, the children tried to be optimistic as, one by one, I lifted the burnt cakes from the pan with a fish slice and layered them like pieces of soot-black roof tiles on a blue flowered plate. The plate looked highly offended, being more designed for delicate cup cakes than a pile of incinerated carbohydrate.  When the Welsh cakes had cooled (and hardened even more) we tried them. 'They're nice, Grandma,' the children said, biting into them gallantly but with true alarm in their wide eyes like those facing a zombie invasion or firing squad.   The only consolation is that ap