The excuse of a bad cook: it's all about love, honey

The chicken is, unfortunately, breast meat.
"Meat on the bone is more flavoursome," a friend of mine who cooks extensively had told me, and I have believed it to be so all this time. Reluctantly, I cut away the stringy yellow fat and dice the chicken. The tomatoes are not much to look at - but when they are cut, I see they are beautifully red and have the ripe savoury smell that I love. These are chopped roughly and set aside to sit with the small amount of cubed yellow onion. The carrots are carefully peeled then diced to fit in with the onion. Big white mushroom slices are cut next. The red pepper smells so sweet, I end up eating some of the chopped up pieces. But my favourite part is crushing the garlic. The pale cloves are as big as my thumb, and I relish the loud crunch they make as I first pound them from above with the side of my knife, then mince them into pieces. The green olive oil sizzles as I push in the garlic and onions - the stage is now set for a chicken dish to be born.

In the moment I am cooking, I am part of an experience shared by many - that of preparing food for one's loved ones. My mother toiled for years during her frequent bouts of illness to make enough tasty food to keep her three daughters healthy and happy. My grandfather, who is now nearing age eighty, cooked for my invalid grandmother until her death. My aunts cooked snacks and huge feasts for the gaggle of cousins whenever there was a chance. And then there are my friends who have cheerfully whipped up entire Indian banquets so that I could contentedly gorge on the sumptuous food.

When we cook at home it is about enjoying the experience of creating something, as much as it is the end result - and on occasion depending on the chef's abilities, it is more about the process than the food. It is also about the pleasure of doing something for another person - you are making an edible offering of love. The cook is God-like in some ways; she alone can decide whether this recipe will have cheese in it or not. The expression of love comes in deciding whether the person who will eat it really should have something with so much fat or salt or sugar content in it - something restaurants never care about.

I decide M. deserves some red wine, so I pour a little less than half a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon into the mixture. The clear chicken broth is also poured in, as is a dash of balsamic vinegar. In the last minute I add in some tomato paste, then I put the entire mix to simmer away until M. is ready for dinner. Will it turn out as planned, or will it be another unmitigated disaster, I wonder, but I am not afraid. If he doesn't like it, he can have my rice and prawns.

Unmitigated disasters are something I am familiar with - through my own cooking and also my mother's. There are at least three dishes she made for us when we were children that I remember clearly - the first, a grilled fishhead with curry powder on it, which we thought was disgusting but she insisted 'there are people out there in the world who eat this', the second, rice made with milk on the grounds that we had a surplus of milk that week (we had kimchi as a side dish, which made things worse), the third, one Sunday lunch 'surprise' of tortelloni in seaweed soup. With such a wealth of experience of culinary eyebrow-raisers I am not easily scared away from cooking and perhaps creating my own.

I poke a chicken piece with a wooden spoon and it splits willingly into two. There is a rosemary sprig I have dried for occasions such as this and I put it into the stew. The dark sauce is quietly bubbling away under the glass lid. Later, M. comes home and says the wine is overwhelming the taste of everything else (something which is quite likely given how much I put in, but I don't own up to it, naturally) and I wonder if I am turning into my mother as I watch M. stoically eating the chicken with some pasta. He knows it is a labour of love, albeit a taste-challenged one.