Dialogue: So what's cooking? Not a lot

By ROANNE PARKER

I have no culinary superannuation to speak of, but it's just too bad. I've retired from the kitchen.

I used to read a little sign in my auntie's house when I was small that said: "Kitchen closed because of illness - I am sick of cooking." It appealed to me even then, back when cooking was all about taking out the bottom of Mum's best pan when the popcorn burned.

Now that sign haunts me. Not only am I in a phase where I am sick of cooking, I seem to have forgotten how. Not only have I forgotten how to cook, I have forgotten how to shop for food to cook.

Every week I go to the supermarket and come back with bags of salad and carrots and apples that we eat raw, and packets of things that make the lunchbox ritual each morning more of a slam-dunking than a manufacturing process.

There is usually cheese, milk, eggs and bread and four packets of crackers, too, but how I spend $200 on these is a mystery.

So I get home from work and open the pantry and try to imagine a dinner I can make in 10 minutes using the above ingredients, and I am flummoxed. I shop poorly, therefore I buy takeaways. That should be the little sign hanging in my kitchen.

The full gamut of my domestic inadequacies hit home last week with the presentation of the kit list for Miss Six's first overnight camp with Pippins (no, she was not taken away by old fashioned apples; she is a member of the local mini-Girl Guides).

She needed a ditty bag, helpfully described as a cloth bag with a drawstring top. Now, I do possess a sewing machine but I have used it only once, to make some cheap curtains, which eventually turned out to be expensive curtains when you amortised the cost of the sewing machine.

So I grabbed a groovy shopping bag with a drawstring top and tipped the crockery branded with "Olivia" on sticking plasters into that.

Next was the biscuits or cakes - homemade only, please. I kid you not. I have no problem with baking, apart from the aforementioned lack of ingredients, but even if I had the time or the flour to do any homemade baking, it would be gone before I could send it off to Pippins. So we trotted off and bought the most homemade-looking biscuits Foodtown could offer.

The next challenge was a waterproof situpon. What on earth is a waterproof situpon? I figured it was a plastic thing big enough for a 6-year-old's bottom, so after I got the biscuits home I neatly folded the Foodtown bag and popped it in with the crockery. Three ticks on the list, just 500 to go.

The wee one and her semi-trailer of gear were duly dropped off, and collected again 23 hours later. And how was the camp? "You forgot to pack my sunhat and sunscreen." Oops. "And I made a fairy skirt and a fairy placemat - you never told me it was going to be a fairy camp."

This is a girl who has never really got into the whole fairy thing. "The big fairy kept throwing glitter in my hair, even though I told her I hate glitter. She said, 'Too bad - I have to throw it on you,' and she gave me a headache." Tears were welling now.

(I interrupt to ask you to listen next time a child tells you they don't like something. There are so many hazards in this world they are growing up in and they need to know they can say no, even if it seems like a silly thing like glitter from a fairy.)

She brightened considerably when she relayed how a big crocodile had tried to eat the fairy's arm, although I am yet to get the finer details of that escapade. Now there are lots of blue sparkles stuck to her scalp and she's had her fairy suspicions confirmed, but she seems keen for the next camp.

And I came out of my retirement for a minute today and bought a big chicken and roasted it. So there's protein in the fridge and I'm polishing my halo as I speak.

I study and I work full-time and have three busy children and I'll always have time to cuddle a teary Pippin. But I'm sick of cooking, I'm bad at shopping, and I can't thread a bobbin to save myself. Auntie would understand.