Eva Bradley: Bags of fun as romance back on the menu

Eva Bradley Photo/File

There is all sorts of press about how "love conquers all", "friendship is everything" and "all you need is a roof over your head", but let's face it ... if you haven't got something to chew on, not much else matters.

Just try asking the 800 million people on the planet that don't have enough to eat.

Maybe food isn't something you stop to think about much. Or maybe, like me, it's pretty much all you think about all the time. But the reality is that our whole lives circulate around it.

We work to earn the money to buy it, we plan our homes around the space in which we cook it, our towns and cities are largely dedicated to the procurement and enjoyment of it and we spend a large part of our free time preparing and consuming it.

And today, thanks to a growing rash of celebrity chefs and prime time reality shows, we even spend our spare time being entertained by it.

And yet, despite all this, I am like so many people now who can't think of anything worse than cooking dinner. Except perhaps think about what to cook for dinner.

As a result, for many years we have followed a fairly unstructured routine that consists of buying a random collection of all food groups in the hope that they will magically combine to form light, healthy and tasty foods in lightning time.

Phase two of the routine when we finally get around to cooking at 8pm is to throw together whatever will get us sitting in front of an episode of Homeland the quickest.

Once the sausages and wedges have been eaten and the rotten, uncooked vegetables thrown out, the whole process begins again. Badly.

It is into this environment that our first "My Food Bag" was delivered several weeks ago. Although dubious about how people with our skill set and interest in preparing food could fit into the box of pre-packed set menus, I was keen to swallow the hype the rock star new food business was generating among our friends.

It's not often in life that expectations are met, especially around something other people have been talking up.

But seriously - we've been so excited about how fancy, tasty, healthy and easy our meals have been lately that our exuberance has been known to wake the baby.

When I met my husband he was such an inexperienced cook I literally had to teach him how to cut a tomato. Even five years on he still freaks out when I ask him to make a salad.

Yet last night while I read a book with a wine in hand, he whipped up a courgette, mushroom and truffle Pappardelle with a rocket, grape and almond salad.

Being new parents, we are still adjusting to the fact we can't dine out and socialise in quite the way we used to. But now we set the table outside with candles and the best china and it feels like a fine-dining date night all the time.

The best thing is you no longer have to cook for your friends. Because we're all eating the same meal at different locations, we simply invite them over for a wine after dinner and discuss the finer details of the grilled chicken with blueberry, lime and chilli salsa with sticky pumpkin we all just ate.

The directors of My Food Bag did not sponsor the writer of this column. But by crikey, they should have!