This was a delicious dinner cooked by Jac: panfried chicken with homemade mushroom sauce served with corn on the cob, green beans, cucumber, green seedless grapes and oven-fry frozen chips. You can probably see the chips were kind of pathetic and sickly-looking. “I should’ve baked or mashed potatoes,” Jac sighed, as she picked up a sad spindly chip. I didn’t mind – everything else on the plate was fantastic, and I only had eyes for that gorgeous golden brown chicken and chunky mushroom sauce… and that bright yellow sweet corn!

Jac used fresh mushrooms, onions and herbs along with a little stock and Carnation cooking soy milk to make the sauce. She wanted it to be creamy yet dairy-free, so she used a little cornflour to thicken up the sauce. She ate her corn with butter; I rarely add butter to corn. For me, if the corn is sweet and juicy, I’m perfectly content to eat it without anything else and just enjoy the natural corn flavour.

The rubbery, juicy mushrooms were the best part of that sauce. I love a chunky sauce that has lots of flavour, and the texture of the mushrooms made eating that yummy sauce even more pleasurable and satisfying. There was more sauce left in the pan and I didn’t hesitate to have more. I slathered sauce on my cucumber and beans. Jac didn’t eat her chips, but I smothered my chips in sauce too and they tasted pretty good when smothered in that mushroomy gravy! I wiped up every last drop of sauce on the plate with the chicken as I ate.