I cooked for the love of it for years. Now I'm happy to take shortcuts - and what people don't realise, doesn't seem to worry them.
Last Friday I cooked for 40 people. When I say cooked I mean warmed up. Because despite my reputation of being a decent cook, the truth is I know where to buy, how to rip the packaging off and transfer my purchases into fancy yet rustic dishes, and how to cover these newly christened "home cooked meals" with a fresh tea towel with such care it would be impossible for the untrained eye to detect it was not prepared by me.
I wasn't always like this. For years I made my own stock from scratch, gently rolled out homemade lasagne sheets and unfriended people if I found out they bought meat from the supermarket. Which is probably why my mates swallow my food fraud: they've seen me slave way doing the hard yards in the past. A bit like a doctor who starts murdering her patients.
These days, you know the tiramisu, lamb, ricotta and mint meatballs, red chicken curry and sushi I brought your function - whipping off the tea towel to a sharp, impressed intake of breath? Bought, bought, bought. Those profiteroles, laksa and cupcakes? Bought.
I'll tell you where it all started. My eldest son's first crèche fete. I was told I was to make something for the cake, jam and preserve stall. I forgot. A text arrived reminding me some competitive, vegan, baby-wearing mum would shortly be picking up my "goods". I got cracking and in the process created the now legendary Salsa della Nonna.
I fried up some onion and garlic threw that into a bucket, chucked in 12 cans of tinned tomatoes, some salt, pepper and sugar and a sad bunch of basil from the bottom of the crisper. While I was microwaving the contents of said bucket, I pulled the box of jars I had been saving, and got my Italian neighbour to write labels that read Salsa della Nonna in her spindly fountain pen hand, while I traced brown paper circles with a side plate.
I whizzed the sauce with the stick blender, poured it into the jars, fastened the brown paper circles over the lid with an elastic band, and whacked on the authentic looking labels. I proudly presented the box covered with fresh tea towels, saying they were made by my 93-year-old Sicilian grandmother with tomatoes she grew in her back yard.
Parents were GAGGING for them. Frothing at the mouth and loving themselves stupid: "Well at our crèche stall we bought authentic Italian tomato sauce made by an authentic Sicilian nonna with authentic tomatoes from her authentic back yard." No you didn't. Even now, 12 years later, people rave about Salsa della Nonna and ask me to let them know when it will turn up at the next fundraiser. "I still remember that taste! You only get that from home grown tomatoes!"
I have four tips for wannabe food fraudsters. When you are complimented on your dish mutter something about it not being as good as usual because the oven was off, your usual ingredients were not available or you were short on something. When you're buying in, buy the good stuff. Rough the food up, and put a few dints in it. And when asked for the recipe just tell em you're an instinctive cook and "do it by eye".
So why when people ask about food I serve, take to people's dos or present at stalls do I suggest at best and flat out lie at worst that I made myself? Because 70% of the taste is in the brain. Not only do people think it tastes better if it's home cooked, they think I am awesome and that I love them more.
I've spent a lot of time cooking for the love of it. But my current motto with food is: let's get to the best possible place with the least amount of damage. Better be a food fraud than ever cook with bitterness.
Now I just eat for the love of it. And for the love of watching my loved one's eat. It's not about food, it's about hospitality. (And the thrill of trying not to be sprung.) The truth is I'm old and can do it, I just can't be stuffed. But if it makes you feel any better I love you enough to lie. And by the way, I want my tea towels back.
Homemade or shop bought? It's the tea towel that will fool them Photograph: Bon Appetit/Alamy