I am sorting through the kitchen drawer, you know the one where you shove all the bits and pieces, – the takeaway menus and the washing machine manual, lolly-sticks from that time you were gonna make your own, broken bamboo skewers that you are saving in case there is a bamboo shortage. So, I was sorting through the drawer, though it is more like a cupboard, overspilling down the back, the shelves below littered with essential items like a melon baller, for when you need more balls and silicone cupcakes stained with something gross.

Look, we are going to be here forever if you insist on me listing every damn thing I have in the junk drawer in the kitchen – don’t get me started on the drawer of doom in the hall where batteries and biros go to die.

So, I was sorting out the drawer when I came across a load of old menus.

I’ve always planned our meals for the week – with money tight and half a football team to feed, it made sense to have a plan. And honestly, it got it out of my head, even though it was sometimes a struggle to think of something new, having a menu, often scrawled on the back of an envelope, stuck to the fridge meant I could get on with the rest of a busy life.

These menus, the ones I found, are old and stained and tattered, – some over twenty years old. I used to keep them so that on weeks when my brain was too busy with rehoming dead batteries, I could reuse an old one, the meals already planned out.

Our diets have changed, my husband and I, without the demands and preferences of a herd of kids.

Chilli, spag bol, or cheesy mash are no longer on the menu, though they make an occasional nostalgic return. I hadn’t really noticed this shift. We eat more fish now, not just fishfingers, more curry, fewer sandwiches and crisps.

We often only cook one meal a day, snacking for breakfast and tea. There is no cereal in the house, or squash, or yoghurts or bizarrely much fruit. There are so many veggies, even though my kids were always good at eating their greens.

There are fewer big stews and fewer making meals last – the roast on Sunday stretched to make pie on Monday and soup for Tuesday. We rarely have a roast.

The biggest shift, the one that has taken years to adjust, has been the size of the meals. Used to often cooking for ten, my saucepans were overflowing and capacious. Our current waistlines have much to do with the size of our pans. Scaling meals back was a challenge when you cook by eye, and portions for two get lost in a pan as big as the stove. In the end, I bought new pans.

I don’t bake as much either. 

I loved the look on my kids’ faces when I served them cake, leftovers tucked up into lunch boxes. They felt themselves so hard done by too – only homemade cake at home – deprived of a chocolate mini roll.  I made all our bread too, the smell of it drawing teenagers from their rooms, blinking as they returned to the light, to slather still-warm bread with inch-thick slabs of butter.

I miss feeding my family.

The menus, piles of them spread across the table, are a history of my life. A snapshot of our routines, – always something quick on Thursdays as the kids had swimming, pizza on Fridays as the pizza hater was out at a club and would eat later. Something on our laps for Saturday nite movies.

I miss those days.

Not the washing up or the shopping or the planning or the worrying at the till that I might need to put something back.

I miss those dinners with the kids.

The menus go into the recycling – of no use to anyone but me. I go back to the kitchen drawer and carefully stack up the skewers, ready for a bamboo emergency and wonder, now I don’t have a menu, what we’re having for tea.