I recently persuaded my mum to provide me with her recipe for fish pie, which I have fond memories of eating in huge quantity through the later parts of my childhood and which tends to be the first meal that springs to my mind whenever I think ‘you know, I haven't eaten any fish in quite a while’. She gave me lots of detail on the ingredients, methods of preparation and so forth; I managed to fill up an entire sheet of A4 with my illegible scrawls. The one thing she omitted was any hint of quantities in the recipe.

As a result, when I tested the recipe on elise last night, it was slightly short of fish (the Sainsbury's fishmonger insisted that if I was cooking for two then I didn't need more than that much, and on reflection I think he was simply wrong) and extremely overendowed with cheese sauce. Still, that didn't make it inedible by a long chalk, and I'm sure I can do somewhat better next time, so yum anyway.

Cooking still seems to be something with a direct line to my ego. Doing it badly tends to make me feel utterly worthless for the rest of the day, but doing it successfully is a big boost and makes me feel really good about myself. And inviting someone round when I'm cooking a recipe that I've never tried before and know I don't have all the details of – well, that's just scary. I don't think I managed to finish feeling nervous until we'd almost finished eating it.

I can only hope that at some point I'll stop feeling that way about cooking. I used to feel the same way about driving when I first got a car, and I got over that after a while. So there's hope of recovery.

(Well, to be fair, it was partly my own fault too.)