This has been a bad weekend for cooking. It almost makes me want to give up.

Now that Jayne is back from her cruise and had a few days before needing to go back to work, I thought I would make sure she got a couple of proper meals inside her. Over the last few years I have been doing more spicy food for myself – lots of teriyaki, Mexican, Korean and so on. Meanwhile, Jayne has been retreating to plain food so on Saturday I did a beef and onion puff pastry pie with peas and mashed potato.

I was very pleased with the results but Jayne thought it was too strong, just because of the Worcestershire sauce in it.

Sunday was another matter. I decided to do a beef stew. A brilliant plan. Jayne likes my beef stews, and there would be enough left over for my lunch on Monday. And probably dinner too. The smell permeating the house all day was fantastic, mostly because of the thyme in the stew I think.

When we sat down to eat, Jayne commented that the dumplings tasted ‘a bit funky’. I thought she was being picky again, but had a taste and had to agree with her. I know the texture was not great because I used a bit too much water, but there was a bit of an odd taste. I remembered that the cornflower I used to thicken the stew was an old-looking box so I checked that and saw that the use-by date was some time in 2020. I then checked the box for the suet and found that went out-of-date in 2022.

I had been looking forward to that stew for days, but in the end decided not to risk eating any more. With the amount of re-plumbing my gastric tract has had I shouldn’t take too many risks with it.

I have decided to have a bit of a clear-out of the cupboards during the week.