Tonight we have home-made pasta for supper for the first time since I killed my last pasta rolling machine around Christmas-time. I have now gone through two of these gadgets, killing one after about eighteen months of use (broken clamp and the machine is useless without) and the other after only six months (completely knackered rolling system). Although it is technically possible to make pasta without one, I am so ham-fisted that I have never been able to master the art of rolling the dough thin enough by hand so I end up with pasta that would be more at home as an anchor than as food.

As a treat to myself for working so many hours and on the principle that all work and no play makes Linda a VERY dull girl, I treated myself to a new machine. This time, I am hoping to beat the bogie man and keep this one for a long time. I’ve been to Delia’s shop and taken her advice – you CAN’T go wrong with a Delia recommendation. She is one of those people, love or loathe her, who is very rarely wrong about anything.

So, I am now the owner of an Imperia machine, that makes all sorts of pasta, including ravioli. This is the rolling bit for the ravioli – you have a hopper for the filling and roll two sheets of pasta together with the filling to make the parcels of ravioli. Hmmmm. I am not sure about that – I have a suspicion it will get very messy indeed with me at the helm. There may well be a day, not too far from today, when I splatter the kitchen, me, the dogs, DM and anything else within a 200 feet radius with pasta or filling or probably both.

Anyway, tonight is a more simple dish because I am grumpy and fed-up about going back to work tomorrow after my ‘holiday’ has flown by with nowhere near enough hours in the day to get everything I needed to do done.

I promised myself that the grand plan would be a full step nearer completion and it’s barely hobbling along, although we have now clinched a deal so even if it means working 24 hours a day, we only have a few weeks to finish this step and this time the deadline cannot be broken or we will be in breach of our contract. I have a feeling the next few weeks will continue to be extremely hard going. Everything we do takes four times as long as it’s supposed to take – or at least, four times as long as we’ve allowed for each job. I am worn out and I have to go back to my day job tomorrow.

Poor old DM – he has driven 250 miles and cleaned the car yet he’s got a frosty-faced Linda to look at this evening……

Last year I was ill.....