Kerrie O’Neill looked at the congealed mess stuck to the bottom of her expensive Le Creuset casserole dish. Beef, tomatoes, onions, garlic and peppers had all lost any reasonable shape and were fused together into a sludge of brown misery which was like some sort of glue. Ugh. She poked it with her wooden spoon. Nasty, nasty, nasty and nothing like the glossy picture in her Jamie Oliver cookbook. The people who wrote those books and sold them should be locked up. What did they mean by saying this load of tripe was easy and simple to prepare? Jamie and his friends, off quaffing a glass of wine in the photograph, while Armageddon happened in her oven! She’d spent a fortune on the sirloin steak and organic onions and peppers, and now all she had was a pot of rice boiling on the hob and a great big lettuce salad. What was she going to give Matt for dinner?
He was working late and she’d promised to have dinner ready when he got home. Usually he did the honours and was cooking for her when she got in … he was the best boyfriend ever, and living with him was perfect, but he had a right to expect her to turn out the odd meal that was edible. It was so frustrating! Everything she touched seemed just to go absolutely wrong … nothing she cooked or tried to make ever turned out right. She read the books. She studied the recipes, measured the ingredients exactly with the expensive kitchen scales she had invested in, and followed the method step by step, every time expecting some kind of decent result!
Nigella, Rachel Allen, Jamie, Neven Maguire, Sophie Dahl, Gordon Ramsay, Domini Kemp … she wasn’t an idiot, but how did it happen that, despite slaving over their recipes, no meal she produced even vaguely resembled the glossy photos of their luscious dishes in the cookbooks? It wasn’t fair. Matt’s mum was a cordon bleu trained cook, and his girlfriend a useless one!
She tested the sludge. It tasted burnt, and on closer inspection some of the meat was tough and blackened. Maybe it was their fan oven that did it. Was it too hot and burning the bejesus out of everything? God, what a mess! Better destroy the evidence before Matt got home, she thought, and getting the wooden spoon she began to scrape it all into the bin. She’d soak the pot, even though it looked like it could take days before the stain from the brown mess would wash off. Then she’d pop it into a bucket and throw a tea towel or two on top of it to hide the incriminating evidence. Maybe she should have phoned her mam and got her recipe for the beef stew she always made. The big pot of her mam’s concoction of meat and vegetables was a constant feature on the stove in the small red-bricked house on Riverfield Grove where she had grown up. The stew tasted even better by day two or three than when it was first served. It was almost like a soup by the time they all polished it off and got her mam to make a new pot. How did her mam do it? Turn out edible meal after meal? Kerrie certainly hadn’t inherited her mother’s talent for cooking.
She gave a quick tidy around and retrieved the packet of beef bourguignon from the freezer. Polly’s Pantry, their local delicatessen, provided a huge array of their own chilled and frozen meals that could be easily reheated.
Kerrie pulled the beef dish from its wrapper and packaging and reheated it in the microwave, turning it into one of her beautiful blue oven dishes. Then she poured in a drop of red wine from the open bottle on the counter before giving it a final touch by sprinkling on a few bits of red onion and some chopped parsley. It really looked homemade, she thought proudly, before popping it into her oven and hiding all the packaging in the bin.
She loved Matt; loved to hear the sound of his key in the door, his heavy footsteps on the floor, the smell of his aftershave, the steady rhythm of his breath as he pulled her close to him. Matt was the man she truly loved, her other half, her better half, her fiancé. He was so kind and good and intelligent, and she still couldn’t believe that in only a few months’ time she would be married to tall dark handsome Matt, and would be Mrs Kerrie Hennessy!
She was busy on the internet when Matt returned home.
‘Hey, that smells good!’ he said, smiling and kissing her.
‘It’ll be ready in a few mins,’ she warned, ‘so why don’t you get out of your suit and change?’
She watched proudly as Matt tucked into the beef. Everything looked perfect: their oak table and brown leather table mats, their white plates with the ripple design and their modern glassware. The mixed leaves were in an expensive hand-turned salad bowl and the rice in a Stephen Pearse bowl.
‘Thanks,’ Matt said, raising his glass of wine to her as if she had performed some great feat. ‘It’s delish. Maybe you should cook this the next time we have Justin and Lindsey over. We haven’t had anyone to dinner for ages. I’ll set something up.’
‘Sure.’ She smiled. ‘That would be fun.’
‘We’ll get a few good bottles of wine in, and some beers, too, since we’ve lots to talk about.’
Kerrie nodded. Matt’s best friend Justin was going to be his best man. He and Lindsey had got married the previous year in a big wedding in the Mount Glenn Hotel in Wicklow, a complete contrast to the small exclusive wedding she and Matt were planning in the South of France, with only thirty or so people attending.
‘Hey, is there any more of the beef left?’ asked Matt, looking hopeful.
‘Sure,’ she said, scooping the last of the beef out on to his plate. As she watched him polish off a second helping, she made a mental note to cook at least five packs of Polly’s Pantry beef if there were four of them eating.
‘I’m such a lucky guy,’ he said, snaking his arm around her waist and pulling her on to his lap. ‘Meeting a girl like you, and then getting to marry her.’
Kerrie buried her face in his shoulder. She loved him. Loved him madly! Meeting Matt had been the best thing ever that had happened to her, too. He’d transformed her life … changed it totally.
‘And you are such a good cook, too!’
She blushed. Lies! Lies! Lies! How had she got herself into this? How much longer could she go on pretending to Matt to be someone she wasn’t?