My cats love me .....

they think I am a good cook because I can use a can opener! If only they knew the truth. In reality I'm a dreadful cook and thus for many years have been banned from using the kitchen for anything more than using said can opener to feed the famished felines.

I am abandoned. I am 'home alone' and have been left to either fend for myself, slowly starve to death or, horror of horrors, survive somehow on a menu of Weight Watchers TV dinners. I cannot understand how these meals can be produced not only to look nothing like the photograph on the box, but also to somehow all taste the same. A taste which closely resembles something like gloppy cardboard! Yuck!

I have begun to take my first tentative steps back into the kitchen and the slow cooker now sits proudly on the stove top in all its new shining glory. The inventor of this amazing gadget is in my mind far superior to they who blasted rockets into outer space and landed men on the moon. I can now feed myself, which to my mind is a way more productive accomplishment than space travel.

I do have one small complaint. Those little packets of powdered ingredients that you add to the meat, onion and other 'bits' that go into producing a meal, need to have bigger writing.

For 'first timers' like me, telling me to chuck the frozen peas in during the last part of the cooking time is enough to send me into a blind panic! If the writing had been bigger I would have read that bit before the peas went in at the beginning!

So the question is, do you spend the next half an hour fishing every blasted pea out of the pot or not?