An Introduction to the Nanny G Notebook

I must have been such a frustration to my Nanny G.

She loved to cook and to eat and to talk about what she had cooked and what she'd been eating. She particularly loved to cook for other people and Sundays were an institution she had built around food. You would always find a legendary traditional roast if you visited at lunchtime, with roasties to die for and two types of stuffing (one would be sage and onion, the other usually some experimental flavour). If you visited at teatime you would be greeted by the kind of spread you only read about in Enid Blyton novels with a table brimming with plates of little sandwiches, cold cuts, butter made into curls, scones toppling from a tiered stand and at least one gigantic spectacle of a cake.

As her only Grand Daughter she tried desperately to pass on everything she knew to me ... and as a cantankerous tomboy of a child I resisted any and all attempts to be domesticated preferring instead to draw with my Grandad. My Brother and Cousin would probably have been a more receptive audience, but they were boys and Nanny G was forever the traditionalist.

Nanny G died from ovarian cancer about twelve years ago. If she was still here I think she would be quietly proud at the progress I have made in the good housewife stakes. I now LOVE to cook and eat, and talk about the things I have cooked and eaten, and cook for other people. I am hoarding foodie magazines in every spare inch of cupboard space and I can happily watch cookery programmes on the tv all day, much to my husbands dismay. I scribble down recipes while Nigel Slater or Nigella Lawson seem to effortlessly create something that looks so delicious it makes me want to lick the television (Nanny G would probably blame watching Pob for that urge!) I even bake a very convincing Victoria Sponge from memory of the recipe she would recite at me over our Sunday feasts.

So, in a bid to free myself from some of the clutter my notebook is moving from the kitchen shelf to this blog. It will never run out of pages, and I can fix my spelling without tippex, and I can save photographic evidence of my successes and failures and if anyone else stumbles across my Nanny G notebook I hope you find something that tickles your fancy here.