I cooked a big stew yesterday evening, which will probably feed me for most of the week.

I never actually decided to do my cooking like that; it sort of grew over a period of years. When I started cooking for myself a few years ago I acquired a couple of lark_ascending's easy stew recipes I remembered from when we were going out, which were originally intended to serve two; but every time I shopped for ingredients I always came back with slightly more than I needed (‘just in case’), and once the stews started getting big enough to feed me for three days instead of two I thought that was actually quite useful (cooking for myself is annoying, so having to do it less often is pleasant) and started intentionally trying to buy for three days, and then overestimated again… At some point the stews began to overflow the saucepan, and my response was to go and buy a bigger saucepan.

This week I went somewhat out of control in the Sainsburys vegetable section. (I find it easy to overbuy vegetables because there's no guilt pressure working against it – after all, veg are good for you, right? So more veg must be better than less.) When I came to cook the stew I discovered it wouldn't all fit in the saucepan – and this was an enormous 4-litre casserole pan from the top end of the John Lewis range and if you can buy a larger one anywhere short of institutional-catering suppliers I don't know about it. Fortunately it all fitted in the pan once the veg had reduced a bit, but it was touch and go.

Well, they say the first step in kicking a bad habit is to admit you have a problem. So I hereby confess that I am a compulsive overcaterer and cannot be trusted to buy vegetables in manageably small quantities.

I think that perhaps it's time I abandoned the practice of judging veg quantities in the supermarket by instinct, and started setting myself a weight guideline and sticking to it. This is getting beyond a joke.