One Corner

Another favourite thing here, a new one this time. This is one corner of the kitchen, the only bit of the house we've decorated since being here. We decorated the whole room obviously, but this particular corner just caught my eye the other day and I stood and looked and realised that I loved it. It's a little right angled promise to myself that one day I'll feel like that about the whole house.

What is it about this corner that makes me go all uncharacteristically houseproud? Partly it's a typical Mr M bit of lateral thinking; using up the offcuts of worktop to make satisfyingly chunky shelves, using an otherwise useless space and getting the collection of cookbooks off the top of one of the bookcases in the living room.

It's a collection of books as well, that's always a winner for me. And it's all the cook books. It's not a hugely impressive collection but it goes back all my life. There are handwritten notes of granny's yorkshire pudding instructions (I had to phone her from my university halls to get that) and the recipe for pastry she always used, learned from some French pastry chef somewhere in London sometime in the 1930s. Another handwritten recipe from my student days, lentil curry, written out by my legendary mate Pete who died almost a decade ago now.

There are also my Grandma's set of the Delia Smith cookery course, three volumes with an absurdly youthful pic of St Delia in 70s polyester on the back of each. We used to flick through those when we went to stay (usually volume 3, the one with the puddings in) and choose something to make. Chocolate mousse, cakes and one one occasion pavlova. Check the egg whites are whisked enough by holding the bowl upside down said the instructions. I was about ten and my brother eight or so, we were impatient and using hand whisks - how well do you think it went?

I still can't make meringue worth a damn.

The Delia cook books came to me perhaps ten years ago now, along with all Grandma's other cook books, when it became clear that the macular degeneration she'd kept quiet to the point of driving to the hospital appointment where it was diagnosed was progressing and she was effectively blind.

These sit with books I've bought myself. The Madhur Jaffrey book of vegetarian curries was the first I think, followed a while later by the Good Housekeeping book of chocolate recipes, which started a love of making ridiculously faffy puddings and cakes. I remember my brother watching me pipe a model of the Eiffel Tower in white chocolate and asking "have you ever thought you might have too much time on your hands?"

More cake books, a couple of Nigella classics - she may be a simpering caricature on the telly but she can write a mean cookbook and some Nigel Slater are more recent additions. Mr M and I bought his gigantic veg growing and cooking bible for Christmas last year and one day we might even use it.

The sad truth is that like most busy families with small children we have a repertoire of five or six dinners we cook again and again. This isn't helped by Mr M's notorious fussiness about food. So I like having my cook books, to read and sigh over occasionally, before another sausage- or chicken- based plain meal.

I also love the shelf for the old irons, Granny M's, which she had forever and which hint at a traveller/canal background which has caught my interest. And finally the garland of paper flowers. Is this for artistic reasons? No. It's to remind us that the shelves are there when we go to put something in the bin which is directly underneath, and which we both forgot incessantly in the first couple of days before we dug the flower garland out and found a use for it.

Nothing's perfect.