Mummy chef

You may think there are not many advantages of triplets, what with two identicals and two who swap clothes. But there are. Because when Shark, Tiger and Squirrel announce who they are at the dinner table and follow that with the fact that they don't like peas and never did, I get to shrug my shoulders and say 'So what? Someone who looks like you liked them yesterday'.

With this laissez-faire attitude I have managed to slip spinach, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, greens and green lentils onto the table, all of which someone says they don't like and which I feel duty bound to ignore.

But sadly, on this one, my time might have come. Because to combat this carefully cultivated ignorance of likes and dislikes maintained for nigh on eight years, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger have taken to a score card with which they issue me marks out of 100, each night for dinner. They even double this score up, to suggest to me that they really know what they're talking about.

First is presentation, then comes taste. For example. Today I am broke, thanks to the simple truth that I have blown all the food money down at the garden centre. We can't eat soil, although Squirrel has tried, and there's not much in the cupboards, fridge, baskets, or in the space next to the plastic bags, where I sometimes dump the tins and leave them there all week because no one ever helps unpack the shopping and I don't have time.

So I cook what's around. It is too late to soak beans. It is the same everyday. But there is some dried pasta, which gets cooked immediately. Then a tin of baked beans, cheese, lots of cabbage, one bruised onion, a tin of tomatoes, and two carrots that are dehydrated and gnarled enough to look like the two raised fingers of Satan's left hand.

Voila! I announce as supper lands on the table with a flourish.

Squirrel is delighted at the sight of a pasta and cabbage mash concoction. Only, I suspect, because she says she is starving and it has a bubbling brown cheesy top, which she likes very much, being creamy and gooey; now she gets to lick the plate so long as we don't tell anyone. Therefore she gives this visual delight, fresh from the oven, a whopping 85 marks for presentation. The impact is only slightly then marred with 65 marks for taste.

Tiger agrees on taste, but offers 100 out of 100 for presentation. I think she is a wonderful daughter, don't you? She clearly knows where dinners come from.

Shark, on the other hand, has no sense of strategy, or possibly personal welfare, and suggests the taste of my pasta cabbage mash with a cheesy top might merit 5. And only that, if she is pushed. I say to Shark, 'There is grass outside'.

On the upside, she is cooking dinner tomorrow night.