It means I work distinctly odd hours – usually 2ish to 10ish, or thereabouts. And, the main consequence for this blog – and my life –  is that it has made dinner, in its lovely hot winey form, virtually extinct, apart from on glorious Saturdays. (Ok. It’s not the world’s greatest hardship, by any stretch. But this is a food blog. I’m allowed to moan about fripperies. For the much  less trivial, read the wonderful Unemployed Hack).

Us subs, and general shifters, deal with said situation in ways varied and numerous. The sensible way, nutritionally, would be to have a proper old-fashioned hot dinner at lunchtime, and then sandwiches for tea. Sadly, this means I may well slump on to my desk in an overfed haze at about 3pm – not so good professionally.

Ideal sub's lunch receptacle

Option two. Eat an ordinary person’s lunch, make it through the shift on a mixture of crisps, fruit and biscuits purloined from kind colleagues, and cook a proper dinner when you get home. Aside from the fact this would mean treating my long-suffering flatmate to my untidy and noisy cooking at about 11pm, I feel guilty eating late AND it takes a lot of biscuits to make it from 2.30 til 11. Trust me.

Three. Pret. And such. Given half the chance – and a lot more money – my laziness would kick in and I would buy a lot of takeaway. But thriftiness says no.

Sadly option four – take food in and microwave it – isn’t possible as we are microwaveless at work. We have a canteen, but it’s understandably frowned upon to drip hot lasagne over the chief sub as you explain the fourth paragraph of your story with an hour to go before first edition.

Sausage pasta #1

Which leaves the cobbled together – and heavily tupperware reliant – option five. If I’m being good, I’ll make soup for a week (thank you, dear flatmate and your blender) so I have at least one vaguely hot meal a day for lunch, albeit eaten precariously as I try to dry my hair and do my make-up at the same time.

Similarly I’ll cook something dinnerish for the week, carefully box it up and eat it cold at work. Which is why I came to be pouring red wine into three days worth of sausage and tomato pasta sauce* at about 10 this morning.

Aside from the inherent risks of early morning alcoholism and eating dinner for breakfast, things that make a good hot meal aren’t always so good cold – and it’s sad to watch it cool down when you know it would have made a delicious dinner. And, frankly, I’m also all too frequently lured into option three by being disorganised and forgetting to make things.

The bit where I want to add creme fraiche and just have it on toast

So it’s my new mission to find recipes that serve as dinner, are delicious cold, can be made in quantity, don’t cost the earth and aren’t sandwiches (packed lunch for dinner is sometimes beautifully reminiscent of journeys and school trips, but not every day).

So. Up with my poor, neglected blog, and on to pastures new – in search of a sub’s dinner. All ideas greatly appreciated.

*I fear giving you a very studenty recipe for sausage pasta would be like teaching many grandmothers how to suck eggs. But I took a couple of nice photos, so I’ve popped them in. My only word on the subject is it’s nice to de-skin the sausages and make them into mini meatballs by coating them in chilli powder/paprika and flour, to keep them together and give them a nice crunchy coating, as in sausage pasta #1 above.  And add some red wine. Just try not to drink it in the morning.

Ta da! Every student's dream/nightmare

Mum's sausage rolls

Now. A whole menagerie of beasts go by the name of ‘pork pie’. And a whole menagerie of people are closet – or not so closet – lovers of this most British of fat-laden snacks. My friend Rosie has organic veg boxes delivered and tends to cook light Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern food, all vegetables and spices and cous cous. But she loves pork pies, especially M&S mini ones.

My boyfriend, on the other hand, is more from the drink-mopping school of pork pie connoisseurs. He marches into Lidl in a hungover blur and demolishes the luminous pink 39p ones in about two bites. I can’t help but be tempted by the new breed of posh ones with stilton or onion chutney added, usually sold for about five times more than they’re worth.

Pork pie a la maman #1

So making a pork pie – a proper pork pie, peppery and coarse, with homemade jelly – has been her holy grail for years.

Three weeks ago, she finally did it. And yesterday, she made another one, the recipe tweaked a little. Both times, it was marvellous (unlike my photography):

Mum's pork pie #2

None of that fazed mum. Bias aside, her pie really was seriously good. The pastry was perfect, naturally, with that strange alchemy of crunch and clag you need in a pork pie. The meat was coarse but tender, peppery and soft, and the jelly – oh, the jelly. It’s always been my favourite bit, and I think a pork pie which is tight on the jelly is a thing of misery. But there was plenty in this, tasty and wholesome from homemade stock.

Mum's pork pie, angle #3

Next time she’s going to try chicken and ham. Maybe with a bit of stuffing. I can’t wait until Christmas.

The Rainbow Café in Cambridge has done this beautifully, attracting glowing reviews and loyal customers for their mixture of vegetarian staples, like their spinach and ricotta lasagne, or far-flung dishes like their Ethiopian Mesir Wat (lentil bowl). And, stereotypical as it may sound, vegetarian cafes usually do a mean carrot cake – the Rainbow Café proudly say theirs is the best Nigel Slater has ever tasted.

But where the Rainbow Café falls down is on price – as a lowly student, I always thought £9.95+ was a bit steep for lunch (especially when I wasn’t getting a dose of much-needed iron to sort out my pallid library-induced complexion). Not so at the Museum Street Café in Ipswich, where their imaginative, tasty and homecooked vegetarian food costs as little as £4.50.

Two things to notice first about the Museum Street Café. One, jugs of water and glasses come as standard on each table. Two, you queue up for your food, so service is quick, you can see what today’s specials are – and can work out for yourself just what a beetroot and goat’s cheese pattie will look like (this…)

Beetroot and goat's cheese patties

If that hasn’t endeared it to you already, then the fact it’s always bustling, food runs out (rather than being resurrected from some over-frosted freezer), and the owner is usually on hand to recommend his favourites should do the job. Just like the Rainbow Café, it tries out exciting new ideas to tempt people in – and they really work.

Indecisive as ever, my friend Soph and I picked two dishes and shared them – huge platefuls which meant we weren’t competing for the last mouthful. We chose the sweet pepper and onion tart and the beetroot and goat’s cheese patties, served with beetroot tzatziki and rice.

Both were gorgeous. The tart was lovely, just warm, really cheesy, creamy and downright savoury, with good crispy pastry. The beetroot patties – not quite the disturbing shade of pink my camera converted them to – were good too, fresh and sweet,  with a creaminess and depth from the goat’s cheese. The beetroot tzatziki verged on overkill, but it was tangy and colourful and helped to cut through the goat’s cheese. Both came with a green salad, which was freshly dressed as we waited, and for an extra charge you can get a variety of brightly-coloured side salads.

Sweet pepper and onion tart

Other options included a spicy dahl, and a gorgeous-looking lasagne. Everything’s vegetarian, and they have a great selection of cakes too, including their version of the commonplace carrot cake – a courgette cake, which I’m still working up the courage to try.

Warm and bustling, the Museum Street Café makes you feel like you’ve just wandered into your friend’s kitchen. The food is substantial, a proper meal rather than just a sandwich, the prices are little more than you’d pay for a boring chain cafe panini, and the quick service means you can nip in on your lunch break.

Try it – and bring along your most carnivorous friend. They’ll be surprised.

A 'pumpkin-spiced latte with chai', according to the kind Flickr person from whom I borrowed it

It might have hit Suffolk a bit later than elsewhere, but the cult of the chain café has done its damage here too. Despite spending too many of my formative years ensconced in the sofas of Ipswich’s first Nero, whether it be gossiping, revising (from A-level geography to the finer points of the Faerie Queene) or, lately, knitting and being nosey, now even I’m slowly moving away from my favourite haunt. In the last five years, the grip of the chain café has just become too strong.

The worst victim is the poor old Great White Horse Hotel, which has now been colonised by a Starbucks. It’s admittedly one of the more elegant ones, but the fact that the other half of the building is home to a fly-by-night shop selling diamante and sequin covered handkerchiefs masquerading as skirts slightly detracts from its supposedly classy image. Together with the Carr Street Costa and the original Nero, it forms a Bermuda Triangle of mass-market coffee shops, all within about twenty paces of each other.

But now, finally, Ipswich is fighting back. It’s always had a few old-fashioned, tea-and-bun style establishments, like Pickwicks, or Blends in the Buttermarket, but nothing to tug a younger generation away from the lure of Starbucks.

Not so now. Every time I come home, there’s another shiny new café, brimming with good coffee, individual touches and an optimism which will hopefully sustain them through the recession.

In the last few days I’ve managed to fit in two visits to Caffè Basso (being a soon-to-be-employed journalist is tough). It’s been around for more than a year now, but, shamefully, I’d never been before – now I wish I had.

It’s great. Glass-fronted and sleek, if it wasn’t for the unavoidable view of the Co-op car park, you could almost forget you were in England. They’ve tried to make it as authentic as possible, and apart from the jarring note of a bottle of Smirnoff Ice in the fridge (what?!), they succeed . Italian radio plays in the background and even the toilet pays homage to Basso’s roots – one of the walls is decorated entirely with Italian newspaper pages, covered in glass. In other hands it could have been tacky, but everything is done lightly and elegantly, so it’s classy rather than kitsch.

The coffee list is refreshingly to the point, with some new names to add to the familiar list, including a Corretto (which I’d never seen before), a coffee with an added shot of sambuca. Maybe not for breakfast.

Beer + Coffee = Perfection

But the coffee – even sambuca-less – is really very good. Their cappuccino was small, with just the right amount of tight-bubbled creamy froth rather than the shaving foam beloved of some places, and the coffee was strong without being bitter.

It’s licensed, so you can have my current favourite pairing – an espresso with a beer. The cakes displayed behind the beautiful curved glass counter look gorgeous – my friend’s ‘americano’ (New York-style) cheesecake was generous and creamy, her only complaint the lack of a proper biscuit base (‘it’s the best bit!’). They also do a mean-looking tiramisu, a couple of tortas and, unusually for Ipswich anyway, delicious ricotta-filled cannoli.

Their food menu is different, too – we had a flatbread filled with goat’s cheese and spinach, and although the filling could have been more substantial, the bread was great, with a bite and chewiness very different to dull pre-packed panini.

Goat's cheese and spinach flatbread

With free wi-fi, the day’s papers lying about, reasonable prices (£1.40 for an espresso, £2.05 for a cappuccino) and plenty of space, it’s the perfect place to relax and read in peace without being harried along. And there’s not a Starbucks logo in sight.

There’s loads more Ipswich independents to add to this list, including the gorgeous Museum Street Café, Saints, St Nicholas Stores and the Napoli Deli, and I’ll be writing about them in the next few days, but I’d love to have some more recommendations for the best independents in Ipswich – please send me your suggestions!

The answer, of course, is no. At the risk of parroting a commonplace fact, in the last few years it’s clear that any lingering shame at the pinnacle of British cuisine being fish and chips has evaporated. Instead, we have witnessed the rise and rise of the New British Classic, steered by a new – and now endemic – beast; the gastropub.

Once a welcomed innovation, now they are being held up as one of the causes of the decline of the British pub. Traditional boozers – go to Save the Boozer to recommend your local one –  have found themselves stripped, left colourless and with little more than an Ikea chair and an overpriced menu to cover their dignity.

But they’re not all like that. One of the success stories is to be found tucked away in the Buckinghamshire village of Haddenham, familiar to Midsomer Murders fans as one of the sets for the long-running series. Given its location, amidst the village’s picturesque duck pond and Tudor-beamed houses, the owners of the Green Dragon pub could easily have succumbed to temptation and transformed the Grade II listed 18th-century building into an over-priced gimmick designed to appeal solely to Londoners on the hunt for a day out in the ‘country’.

Instead, the Green Dragon combines the best traditions of an old-fashioned pub with some really great food, attracting locals and Londoners alike. The inside is cool and airy, and even on a Tuesday lunchtime in term-time, most of the tables were full. The newly-redesigned summer menu is a delight – full of gentle twists on traditional classics.

I could happily have eaten about five things – the Fettuccini Primavera with seasonal vegetables, Parma ham & artichoke looked especially good, and if I’d have been going for dinner I’d have been tempted by the steak, with its intriguing – and delicious-sounding – smuggler rarebit-stuffed mushrooms.

But, after I’d seen it whisked past me by the efficient and friendly staff, I plumped for the bubble and squeak with crispy bacon, poached egg and hollandaise sauce. A simple staple, maybe, but it was gorgeous – the homemade bubble and squeak was golden and crispy on the outside, with a perfect balance of potato and cabbage inside. The streaky bacon was substantial and meaty rather than wafer thin, which made a nice change, and the hollandaise was rich and creamy without being sickly or cloying.

As a poor student/blogger/not-quite-yet-employed person, I can’t wax lyrical about the five other dishes I tried, but suffice it to say everything coming out of the kitchen looked great, and regulars tell me the Sunday roasts – and even the selection of lunchtime sandwiches – are well worth trying.

But, despite not having much of a sweet tooth, for once the dessert was even better than the main. I managed to snaffle one of the last portions of the Dragon’s gorgeous summer puddings. Served with a generous dollop of clotted cream, it was full of ripe raspberries, blackcurrants and gooseberries – partly supplied by local allotments – which were tart without hurting your head (or your teeth).

My only criticism was that, on a beautiful sunny day, seats outside were limited, but it’s a minor point against the great food, relaxed atmosphere, and sense of proper old-fashioned pub-ness – real ales are still proudly on the menu.

It wasn’t an entirely unprompted decision – as usual, it had something to do with cheese, and quite a lot to do with coffee.

Last week, I reluctantly returned from France. The reluctance was twofold. Firstly, it was a 4am ferry, so every follicle and molecule was urging me to sleep. But secondly, and much more importantly, I was leaving behind not so much the land of milk and honey, as the land of wine and cheese, where each day was spent in the warm embrace of a soft chevre, a speciality of the Loire Valley, and a glass of cool red.

Coming back to the wonders of a Shell garage somewhere on the M4 didn’t really help. Somehow we’d swapped cafes selling salads which sang with yesterday’s plastic sandwiches, glowing with E numbers.

It’s not as cheap now anymore, of course, and skipping round a supermarket knocking about 2 euros off the prices is a thing of the past. Plus now Milka and Mikados are available in the UK, part of the joy I always used to have on school exchanges has gone.

But – the coffee! No more decaf-half-fat-frappe-latte-milkshakes masquerading as coffee – in France, it’s either white, or black, small or big, in delicate cups. Strong and smooth, it goes hand in hand with a ladylike glass of Stella (no wifebeater jokes here) and should send shivers of fear through Starbucks.

And I’d forgotten about the bread. Forgotten how a 70 cent baguette from the baker’s in the square manages to be better than the poshest, posing-as-artisan bread here. The crust crispy but chewy, the inside white, fluffy, verging on sourdough as it stretches gently when you pull it apart.

And of course bread, and a jug of water, come with everything, almost without asking. And salads aren’t relegated to the bottom of the menu and doused in Caesar dressing – they are bright and bold, with delicate vinaigrettes, sizzling lardons, molten cheese, generous slices of cured ham…

They cost virtually nothing in labour, and at 8 euros is probably a bit cheeky, but it’s so much nicer to see maybe three or four salads on a menu, with perhaps a quiche and a croque, than a whole litany of ‘and chips’, chosen by the not-so-discerning hands of the freezer and microwave.

But the most striking thing of all were the two lonely shelves in the supermarket selling British food. I will defend custard and HP and Marmite and all the rest to the hilt, but Loyd Grossman, really? And Batchelors’ Pasta ‘n’ Sauce? And Tiptree jam at four times the price of rhubarb Bonne Maman?

Is dried pasta in powder really the best we can do?

Of course not. But good food is taken for granted in France – it’s still a 50/50 gamble here.

Commonplace rant over. I’m going to go and bake a (frozen) pain au chocolat, and pretend I’m not really in Suffolk.

Country bumpkin that I am, I still get a little bit excited about Pret (particularly their more-like-rice-pudding-than-breakfast porridge and their new rare roast beef baguette), and the  M&S food hall is, as I’ve said before, like getting a hug from my mum, even if I still haven’t quite adjusted to the incongruous sight of Cadburys and Cornflakes alongside the minibites and ultimate mash.

But none of this food really seems – real. It’s all so anodyne and plasticked and removed from anything vaguely arduous. Staying in other people’s houses and now at a B&B, I’ve no choice but to select the easiest thing, but it’s so dull dull dull. Especially Tesco. I hate the fact that, certainly in London and now increasingly in Cardiff , there’s one on every corner.

Each is equally tiny, with the same small and miserable selection of meals for one, drearily picked up by dreary food ghosts, sometimes with one of those miserably miniature bottles of wine for one, followed by a dessert. For one. All in several layers of plastic and at several removes from the field it should have started in.

I know I’m perilously close to food-snobbism, or worse still, poor-me-ism, but it’s just all so – sterile.

However. I was saved, at approximately 7.30pm on Thursday, April 15, by the best chips of my life.

I had just spent 5 hours outside the Oakington Detention Centre near Cambridge, helping to cover a rumoured “disturbance” there for the Cambridge News. It was a great experience but, also, as the April sun faded and the gates stayed quiet and closed, very, very cold.

By the time I got back to my B&B, I was frozen to the bone, absolutely starving and far too tired to make any kind of food decision. I did my dutiful ghost wandering around the Co-op, but somehow the prospect of a day-old chicken sandwich with a red reduced sticker slapped over the top didn’t fill me with joy.

My stomach was asking for only one thing. Chips. It wasn’t a want or a craving or even a fancy. It was, I swear, a genuine need.

So, having garnered a strange look from the man behind the counter in the Co-op for buying a solitary can of Grolsch (I’d just spent ten zombie-eyed minutes staring at the beer section trying to decide), I headed to the Viking fish and chip shop, next door to my B&B.

It smelt good. It looked good. It didn’t also sell Chinese and/or kebabs (a Crwys Road special). And, best of all, one of the options was ‘chips with homemade chilli’. I waited the five minutes extra, handed over my £3.10 (less than a Pret baguette, for a start…) and had to stop myself running back to my B&B.

I smuggled them in illicitly and there, on the floor of my bedroom, wantonly spread out the golden chips in their paper. God they were good. Covered in salt and vinegar, they were crispy on the outside and just the right balance of creamy and fluffy in the middle. Hot and satisfying and beautiful. And the chilli was gorgeous – chunky tomato and onion, good quality beef and spicy enough to need the calming stodginess of chips as a balm.

With nothing more than yesterday’s Cambridge News, a chip fork and the spoon from the morning’s coffee cup for accompaniment, it was perfect. At that moment, had someone offered me a Michelin-starred meal, you wouldn’t have moved me from my chips and my B&B floor.

This was food with a bit of soul and not a hint of plastic. Circumstance is all. So, tired and hungry and cold ghosts – abandon Tesco, and head to the chippy. It might just give you a smile like the woman above…

p.s. When I nipped outside to throw out my illicit chip paper, I went back to the fish and chip shop and raved about them to the owner. You can’t do that at Tesco. Although she did look a bit confused…

Canapés and prosecco flowed generously on Thursday at the exclusive launch party of the new Carluccio’s caffe in Mill Lane.

Gabriella Perez serves arancini

Cardiff stars including the BBC’s Rhodri Owen packed the glossy new restaurant to see if the latest London- export would live up to the hype.

Sadly one star was missing from the celebrations – chef Antonio Carluccio himself, who had been taken to hospital after falling ill.

But the cheerful staff did their bit to make sure the party still went on in style. They served Bellinis on arrival and kept copious amounts of canapés circulating to showcase the restaurant’s menu.

We were treated to bruschetta topped with tender beef carpaccio, king prawns wrapped in crispy pancetta and warm arancini, creamy risotto encased in crispy breadcrumbs and deep fried.

There were huge bowls of plump olives too, as well as mozzarella in balsamic vinegar and an entire parma ham which chef Robert Coles sliced while you waited and wrapped generously around grissini.

But the evening culminated in a special Italian-style hog roast, cooked outside by chefs braving the rain. With only just enough room to spare after all the canapés, we still loved the chunks of tender pork, served in salty focaccia with caramelised red onion chutney and rocket .

Chef Robert Coles carves parma ham

The restaurant was perhaps too full if anything, and the room had to be carefully navigated to avoid spilling Bellinis over other guests, but the food more than made up for it.

Managing director Simon Kosoff said the restaurant had only been open for a week but they had already been receiving good feedback.

He praised the city too, saying: “We think Cardiff is a vibrant and exciting place, and St David’s is at the centre of that. Tonight it’s a big party to say thank you to all the people who’ve made this happen, and a few friends as well.

Antonio is in hospital but he told me to send his good wishes to you all. It’s nothing serious and he should be out tomorrow.”

Carving the hog roast

The new Carluccio’s joins a host of Italian restaurants jostling for space near the new St David’s development, including Gio’s, Ask and most recently Jamie’s Italian.

But if the food at the launch is anything to go by, they should stand every chance of holding their own in Cardiff’s new Little Italy.

For most sports, food means fuel. Whether it be protein shakes, dubious muscle-building powders or, for the Olympians, three fried-egg sandwiches and a five-egg omelette for breakfast, none of the scientifically-proven meals eaten by today’s athletes would find their way onto a Michelin-starred menu.

Nor, of course, onto a cricket tea table. With its day-long matches and meal breaks, cricket is the one exception to sport’s food is fuel rule. The cricket tea is a centuries-old institution, and without it club cricket – or its players at least – would crumble.

Although there’s no hard and fast rule for the perfect cricket tea, a lot rides on its quality. Your club will soon be blacklisted if away teams are greeted by nothing more than a curled-up marmite sandwich and some lukewarm squash.

Up until recently, most clubs either had an official tea lady or an unofficial squad of teamakers – the players’ wives, who get a starring role in a Yorkshire cricket heritage project. Although some still do – Lisvane Cricket Club are currently advertising for a cricket tea caterer, at £60 a time – more and more teams have had to enlist the players themselves as chefs-in-chief.

But whoever makes it, the teatime staples haven’t changed much over the years. For sandwiches, egg and cress, cheese and cucumber and tinned salmon are all favourites, usually accompanied by pork pies and sausage rolls. Some more adventurous clubs have even introduced young pretenders like cold pizza and samosas.

Tacky is usually the order of the day. Buy-one-get-one-free Mr Kipling cakes, doused with icing sugar and nestling on a doily, are a must, and a huge multipack of Walkers crisps (with the prawn cocktail left until last) is a given.

And of course an urn should sit steaming in a corner, ready to make umpteen cups of PG Tips. It’s all very 1950s, and no-one – least of all the old-timers who are more interested in the tea than the score – would want to change it.

But the best teas, the really memorable ones, the ones which will make away teams squabble over who gets picked to travel to your club, take the kitsch classics and transform them into a gourmet meal.

Sliced white bread will be replaced by fresh brown or granary straight from the baker’s. Fillings will be generous – creamy egg mayonnaise will ooze out of the sandwiches, plastic wafer thin “ham” will surrender to crumbly butcher’s ham smothered in English mustard and the sausage rolls will be warm, with flakey buttery pastry and peppery sausages.

But most of all, Mr Kipling will be abandoned in favour of homemade cakes. Light Victoria sponges, filled generously with buttercream and strawberry jam, will vie for space with rich chocolate cake and sticky brownies, and buttery scones will be served with clotted cream and tangy lemon curd.

At its best, a cricket tea encapsulates everything great about English cooking. At its worst, it will look like you’ve gone to Kerry Katona and asked her for her Iceland leftovers. Know which side your bread is buttered on, and make sure your team rises to the challenge this season.

It doesn’t matter if their speciality is a painstakingly prepared roast dinner or the dubious “baked bean surprise”. There’s nothing as comforting or reassuring as your mum’s cooking.

Some of it lies in the food itself. Warm golden soup, magically produced from the remnants of yesterday’s chicken; miraculously crispy roast potatoes which you’ve never been able to match, even after years of experimenting with goose fat and dripping and olive oil; steak and kidney pies, oozing with gravy. And of course, the desserts, especially Victoria sponges, filled with jam and buttercream and covered in icing sugar, twice as high as you could ever hope to make them.

Mum's perfect chocolate cake

Yet delicious as they all are, much of it lies in the memories. I loved standing on tip toe waiting to lick cake mixture off the spoon, or donning an apron three sizes too big and being allowed to cut out biscuits, even if I never could do it as neatly as mum.

But until recently homemade food was looked down upon.  “Shop-bought” cakes were the pinnacle of respectability, and the rough edges of a homemade pie looked passe next to the perfect shape of a pre-packaged one. Now though, the twin forces of the credit crunch and a turkey-twizzler-wielding  Jamie Oliver are sending us scuttling back to our mothers’ neatly- typed recipes, and homecooking is suddenly in vogue.

Except it turns out all those hours spent eating cake mixture and cutting out biscuits may not have rubbed off on us as much as we’d hoped. We are struggling to make the leap back from pasta and pesto to steak and kidney pie.

According to a new survey, we are losing the basic skills integral to traditional homecooking. In the ‘70s, two-thirds of women could make gravy from scratch compared with one-third today, and half of them knew how to make shortcrust pastry without needing a recipe. It’s just 16 per cent now.

All this has the “shame on you” faction running for the burning torches. If the supper you’ve whipped up after a long day at work doesn’t simultaneously save money, the planet and your children’s health then you may as well hand in the Cath Kidston apron now. Sensible as a frugal, healthy and downright old-fashioned approach to food is, there’s nothing to gain from turning it into yet another stick with which to beat  already over-stretched mums.

With a full-time job and errant children, it’s hard enough to get something half-decent on the table without trying to perform lamb cawl and bara brith gymnastics. We should preserve the things our mothers taught us, but it’s unrealistic to pretend we can still do them every day. Better to save the Cath Kidston apron and the  weighing scales for weekends.

So, this Mother’s Day, rather than feel guilty for not being Delia as well as Karren Brady, go and take refuge in a slice of your mum’s cake. Or take her a slice of yours – but don’t beat yourself up if it’s only half the height