For my dad, who taught me how to cook.

I’ve always been a good cook. When I was small, Dad taught me scrambled eggs in the microwave. I had a stool to reach the buttons and a special fork just for whisking. I served them on lazy nights, on a square of multigrain toast with margarine. When I was about 7, I graduated to omelettes. I made them for Mum on Sundays, mixing through parsley that I picked from Dad’s garden outside the kitchen window. When eggs were conquered, I made bolognese, masterfully swilling tap water in tomato tins and tying a bouquet-garni. There were various trips to pick lemons, rosemary and bay – bare feet hopping over mulch, ducking spider webs and curious bees.

My first Jamie Oliver book – now 20 years old – is inscribed with the message:

Happy 13th Birthday. All our love, Mum and Dad.

My teenage years were spent roasting garlicky legs of lamb, squishing butter under chicken skins, filling fresh ravioli and ladling ragu over piles of perfect potatoes.

Uni came and I was routinely serving fabulously fluffy focaccia, braising beef-cheeks with forgotten casks of red wine and grinding curry pastes in a kitchen full of instant Mi-Goreng.

I managed to get girlfriends and friends on the basis of my culinary skills alone – who wouldn’t want to come home to a bowl of handmade noodles or a pie in the oven – a love heart carved in the pastry?

Many times I’ve been invited to parties and strictly told – don’t forget the focaccia. If I were a less secure person, with a less delightful personality, I’d worry it was the bread they were after – not me.

My thirties came and there I was, living peacefully with two friends when Covid-19 hit. Suddenly we found ourselves jostling for desk space on the dining table, surrounded by puzzle pieces and discarded tea bags. Over wine one night we made a pact: let’s make the most of this lockdown. Three good cooks in one house? We should be so lucky!

We would conquer our culinary Everests! And so, it was decided – an immortalised promise scrawled in red texta on a whiteboard.

Mim – croissants

Elliot – milk buns

Sian – sourdough

It was Mim’s turn first.

“I have seriously low expectations,” she told us, “I’ve learned to accept that the first time you try something like this – it’s likely to be an epic fail.”

“We’ll love them anyway,” I said, relieved that she knew as well as I did that disaster was inevitable. Croissants take months – no – years to master! Even Jamie Oliver buys pre-packed puff pastry. And he’s an OBE!

Over the next two days, despite the minor setback of locating a ruler (“who uses a ruler?! Is there an app for a ruler?”) she set about rolling layers of butter into rectangles, lining up sheets of dough and cutting them to shape. She did something called laminating and then resting, and repeated this process upwards of 100 million times. She wore an apron tied perfectly around her waist and, as I struggled to complete a puzzle of a giant smiling tortoise, I complimented her on not just the way she held herself in the kitchen, but the way she looked while doing it.

“Gin and tonic, anyone?” she chirped, all sun-kissed from the light through our delightfully sunny kitchen window, “time for a tipple while I rest my croissants!”

A beret climbed on top of her head.

Next, she tailored tapered triangles (isosceles) and rolled them into themselves, like little buttery homes for hermit-crabs. She watched through the oven door like an anxious kid with a fish tank.

They emerged from the oven – impossibly golden, as if browned by the Bondi sun. They were springy and puffy and moreish and utterly perfect. We tore them apart with our hands, greedily gobbling them with jam and chocolate and cream and then declaring, ‘the best way to have these is just… with nothing.’

We were chewing and smiling in tandem. No one had time to reach for a plate. We crossed it off the whiteboard. Mim was thrilled.

The next morning, Elliot walked in the background of my morning Zoom meeting, a ham and cheese croissant hanging out of his mouth.

“Mim made those,” I proudly said, cutting off a group discussion about teaching from home.

“No she bloody didn’t,” a colleague offered.

I could hear Mim grin from the next room.

The next day, fully embracing the Covid-inspired new-normal – we instigated a barter economy and swapped two croissants for some of a friend’s sourdough starter. We named her Jack Black-teria and she was bubbly and stinky and would be ready to rock in 5-7 days.

For the long weekend, we planned a quarantine Easter-Feaster. Mim slow-cooked some lamb for 8 hours. She served huge salads, braised cabbage and roasted pumpkin with pomegranate yoghurt. I curated a cheeseboard complete with mustard fruits, saved for a special occasion from a trip to Puglia.

And then came Elliot’s Everest – the milk buns.

As he mixed his dough with his huge, manly hands, his tall frame hunched over the benchtop, I served Mimosas. At 10am, I shook up three Espresso Martinis and at 11 – Gin Spritzes. Elliot’s rolls were shaped and proved, rolled and glazed. Each was like a little mushroom top, its surface tight and white and lovely. Little pinchable bums. When lunch was served, they appeared effortlessly at the table, lighter than air and spongy and sweet and salty and scrumptious.

He threw those manly hands in the air and cried, “I conquered my Everest!”

The next day, we ate them filled with leftover lamb and mustard. We crossed it off the whiteboard.

Meanwhile, I had faithfully fed my sourdough starter every day for a week. It was time for my Everest.

As the reigning focaccia queen, I was not rattled – if anything, I wished I’d chosen something a bit more challenging. But everyone seemed to be baking right now, the world was running out of flour and I felt it was my duty to show everyone how it’s done.

‘We make bread all the time in this house,’ I said on my imaginary Parkinson interview, ‘you newbies are all just getting started – and you’re buying up all our yeast!’

A guest appearance on The Naked Chef felt likely.

My thirteen-year-old self gave me a pat on the back and off I went.

I made a sludge by mixing my starter with flour and water. I left it for one hour – the perfect window of time for a bit more puzzling. I won’t need puzzles anymore, I told myself, not when I’m a professional baker, selling loaves by the hundred. Old people can have them for free, I promised, just until Corona is over of course.

Next, I turned it out onto the bench and with wet hands, began the ‘slap and fold technique.’

Fold it like an envelope, I muttered.

I scooped my hands under the dough and as I attempted the envelope, my hands emerged covered in a thick glue, the consistency of melted mozzarella. I added a bit more flour – not to worry – and mixed it around as best I could. And, anyway, I said, all I need to do is wait once more – another hour or so, and let this strange goo double in size.

I chucked it back in the bowl and placed it on our perfectly warm windowsill. I waited at my puzzle, smoking an imaginary cigarette.

Four hours later and my ball of goo was no larger. There were no air-bubbles. There was no growth.

I called Dad.

“Just leave it overnight,” he said calmly, just like he would when I was young. And so, placated, I chucked it in the fridge.

“Can we eat your sourdough yet?” Elliot called from his office.

“Nah,” I answered, nonplussed, “apparently if you leave it overnight, it gets even yummier.”

I slept soundly, as confident people do, and in the morning I left my goo to come to room temperature and then turned it out onto the bench once more. I plunged my hands inside. What occurred was the equivalent of diving headfirst into a vat of freshly mixed toffee. I reached for the jar of flour, which promptly became stuck to my hand. Shit. It tipped sideways, emptying onto the bench. Shit. I attempted to roll the goo on top of the spilled flour, determined to stay calm. I squirmed around inside the goo, like the most incompetent of surgeons – the type whose bloody hands would emerge from an open torso with a gall-bladder in one hand and a heart in the other.

“I got it!”

Finally, with crusted islands of flour spotted from wrist to elbow, I pulled my hands free once again and decided on another call to Dad.

In the five minutes it took to wash and scrape the goo from my hands, I managed to cement my fringe to my forehead and cake my phone in sludge, rendering any touchscreen useless.

Dad, laughing, listened calmly to my explanation and, in that moment, the idea of killing him didn’t seem unreasonable.

“What type of glue is it like?” he asked.

“Just glue!” I yelled at the screen, “like a fucking lump of glue!”

“Like clag?” he asked, “or like… industrial glue?”

“Dad,” I took the deepest of breaths, “it’s like fondue, OK? It’s the texture of fucking fondue.”

“Cheese?” he said.

I lifted the dough into our Kitchen-Aid mixer and after another arduous session of vicious hand-washing, I added more and more flour to the bowl, desperate for anything resembling dough to begin to form. Stupidly, I attached the mixing paddle, rather than the dough hook to the mixing machine, and in venturing to make the swap, my freshly cleaned fingers became fused together with great strings of my stubbornly unchangeable creation. I tried desperately to adjust my glasses with my wrists, smearing the lenses as if they’d been cleaned with milk.

I turned to grab a tea towel and in my haste, I bumped the speed controller of the mixer. Plumes of flour mushroomed into the air. Flour covered the sink, the floor, the windowsill and me. I leaned on the island bench, put my face down on the cool marble and closed my eyes. A teaspoon stuck to my cheek.

I washed my hands with a scrubbing brush.

I returned to the mixture. It glared at me from its bowl. I lay down a piece of baking paper and used a spatula to dump my goo onto the bench – determined never again to let my skin come into contact with it.

I steadied myself, wrestling to free the spatula from within the glue, and vowed to make one last-ditch effort at forming anything resembling anything that could ever be placed inside an oven.

At this moment, my foot slipped into the dog’s bowl. Water spilled across the floor.

I began scooting around the kitchen, both feet on a soiled tea-towel and my entire body dusted in flour, ironically, like a freshly baked bun. I attempted to drag the goo, on its baking paper, to the only remaining area of clean bench. My hands, once again, were pathetically and uselessly adhesive. I reached to make the move and, with one corner of baking paper stuck to each hand and my feet sopping wet and slipping across the floorboards, I swiftly manoeuvred the goo ball into the air, and –

I dropped it – the whole thing – upside down onto the floor.

I made a noise I’ve not made before or since. This caused Elliot to emerge, concerned. He paused, took in the scene, and politely left the room. I heard him cackling from behind his office door.

I piled everything into the sink and stood at its edge, unable to recognise my own emotions. That deathly kitchen sun burned through the window, searing my face like a passing comet.

Hasn’t anyone ever heard of a fucking curtain?

I spent the next hour washing up in sunglasses and thinking of Jamie Oliver.

He must never find out about this, I said to myself, as I drained the sink for the 14th time, my wrinkled fingers looking up at me like ten little currants.

My dreams of finally becoming a celebrity chef were over and I wondered what I could possibly do to entertain myself for the coming weeks.

Exhausted, I poured myself a drink.

‘Wine,’ my brain suggested, raising one eyebrow, ‘maybe tomorrow I’ll try and make some wine... how hard can it be?’