Why I love Food and cooking

Wow what a time I have had over christmas. I don't want to bore you but it included a busy time up to christmas with catering, a brutal eye infection which made cooking difficult to impossible, My sister had a stroke and she lives in Greece so I had to fly over there and for a while we were not sure how well she would do. She is fine, hurrah and making a great recovery though she is planning to sue Greece for giving her a stroke. Difficult times. My body then decided to cave in and I fainted in my hotel room and had a kind of a seizure which I am prone to ( hopefully they will work out why this times as it is jolly unpleasant when it happens) and ended up (again) in an ambulance tearing through the streets of Patras to the hospital from hell with an A&E department to outstrip any soap on TV. My poor mother now torn between nursing my sister in a hospital on one side of the town and me on the other. As ever, my life flashes before me and there is a moment if I wander whether I will make it through this time which melodramatic or not is how these episodes make me feel. Three days in a hopsital then a flight back home, Home sweet home. I love my home, my family and my cooking. It is a week later, my eye has cleared up, mentally I am in one piece and I am contemplating a small run (just a small one honest) and once again  food, cooking and supper clubs. Actually I decided to throw together some chocolate mousse for dessert the other night while I hovered over my very experienced good cook friend and criticised her every move ( in the nicest possible way!). She got the last laugh as my mousse turned out spectularly badly. I had added the egg yolks too quickly. Worse still, I managed this twice! I still haven't got over the horror of this. At one of my supper clubs , I threw together about twenty near perfect mousses goddamit.  Clearly I was not ready to return to cooking last week. It also reminded me that one can never be too casual  about cooking. Every task , for me anyway,  has to be approached with the right attitude or it stands a good chance of going wrong. Nigella Lawson says in one of her books " What I have discovered , after a lifetime of cooking, is that anything which holds true in the kitchen , is just as true out of the kitchen"  I buy into that and I am not even really sure why, it just feels absolutely true! Cooking  & food for me is just a reflection of life, full of infinite possibilities, a port in a storm and very very tasty! Thinking what to cook that evening, if I am not working or running around is one of my first thoughts of the day. It is part of the meaning of life, of existence and I am happy today that whatever real or imagined fears I have about living, food and cooking is one of life's joys. On that note, I am going to go off and look at some recipes with a fresh coffee, warmed milk and perhaps a slice of Lemon Drizzle cake. I am still in recovery after all. Karen