Dear LPG, 

Here is a question that got a group of my friends and me talking recently.  We are all ladies under the age of seventy, and I suppose we can best be described as a group of younger pensioners.  Three out of the five of us live alone while one lives with her mother and another with her husband and the subject that got us talking was dinner.   

We all agreed on one thing: we take the habit of eating very seriously, although we all have different ideas of what makes a good meal and how much time we are willing to dedicate to the other activities that are needed before the eating part is possible.  There is so much choice these days and it was really interesting to compare notes on how much time we are willing to dedicate to preparing the dinners we eat.  

We all come from different backgrounds, and we also worked out that our differing pre-retirement lifestyles and living conditions had a lot to do with how long we were willing to spend on making a proper dinner each day.  

One of our group is still happily married and says that she spends an average hour and a half to two hours on preparing a good, round, square meal for herself and her half-French husband each day, although they do cheat on Saturdays and eat out while shopping most weeks.   

Another of our number who had not long retired told us that working and living alone often left her feeling the need to save time.  Her work used to involve a lot of different shifts and so she did quite a bit of bringing takeaway meals home with her which is something that she continues to do, especially now that it is so easy to get them delivered at short notice.   

Then there was the daughter amongst us.  She lives with her older but mum who still does a lot of their cooking. Her mum is very much part of the Windrush generation and spends quite a lot of her time with her older friends while our friend finds herself a daughter of two cultures.  She told us that in their house, dinner time is when they come together and chat about their respective days and, in spite of her age, it is still a case of mother knows best. They always have dinner together every day, and meat and two veg including something green and healthy is always part of the meal.  The length of time dedicated to cooking their dinners depended on who was doing the cooking.   When her mum was in charge, it had to be done from scratch while on her cooking days, though there were not many instant ingredients involved, the words ‘cook from frozen’ often came into play.  There were a lot more ‘air-fryable’ and ‘microwavable’ components included and her way of cooking often was all about getting the meal started and doing something else while waiting for the ping.   

Friend number four told us that there were serious advantages to living alone, and one of the best was being able to choose when and what she eats and always getting her own way.  She admitted to starting all her meals with the best of intentions but ending up doing so much tasting that the plate rarely got to the table.  She occasionally went for something a little more instant like pizza or an oven or microwave-ready boxed meal and acknowledged her tendency to be a bit of a ping-happy cook too.   

I tend to specialise in choosing food that has instructions on the side of the box much too often.  I spend as little time as possible in the kitchen.  Conscience occasionally gets me using fresh meal-ingredients but I also have to admit to using ones that air-fry and microwave quickly most of the time.  I find the hardest part of following ‘side of the box’ instructions is the waiting.  I used to be no good at that with the result that I would just pop off to do something else and forget the meal, missing the ping, sometimes for so long that my nose sensed the overdone aspect of eating.  But I have invested in a couple of things that have helped with all that.  Alexa and a little kitchen television.  Getting involved with the customary afternoon game show keeps me closer to the cooker and, coupled with the sound of an alarm, I am usually brought back to reality when it’s time to check on my meals.  I am all but cured of finding myself the victim of badly timed results.  

We are friends who lunch together at alternating houses, and the interesting thing is that we were talking because I had invited them all to dinner on the day; a dinner that I had made the time to cook from scratch and felt completely confident about serving.  

Isn’t it funny that, when we know that the result really matters, most of us are perfectly capable of making the effort to stay in the kitchen throughout the whole cooking process. 

I think that the answer must be that we all need to entertain more often. 
     

EL, Lewisham.