Nothing will compare to the crippling anxiety of having to cook for someone you are dating for the very first time. Now imagine, if you will, if that person was also a professional chef.

Alas, this was the situation I found myself in some years ago. For context, I am not the most natural cook in the world, or indeed the most calm, but at this point in my life I had successfully fed myself and many others for several years – all of whom have survived to this day.

And perhaps this quiet self-belief was where I went wrong. For as soon as I started to think about what to cook, I found myself in a world of contradictions.

Pacing up and down supermarket aisles, I became conscious of wanting to impress, but also to appear seamless and effortless – just another extraordinary home-cooked meal, one of many, etc. After all, isn’t the benchmark for a capable, attractive person the ability to make a delicious meal whilst hosting, drinking, laughing and saying extremely clever things all at the same time with complete, unwavering ease?! Did I possess the emotional and physical stamina to maintain that kind of high-level charade? Absolutely not. Sure, I was cooking for a chef, but he was also just a guy I (really) liked. No big deal. On the one hand: just another meal. On the other: did my entire future resteth in my own incompetent hands?

In the end I did keep things simple, letting star ingredients do the work in the way I’d often heard him speak about. Things like seasonal asparagus, anchovies or lamb chops. I avoided taking any risks by keeping any actual cooking to a minimum, preferring instead to use a culinary concept I had been developing called ‘accessory cooking’. I relied heavily on ambience.

The result: a fish finger wrap with tartare sauce, peas, lettuce, dill and – the piéce de résistance – sliced pickles.

I am pleased to report that it is still the meal he talks about the most when we are discussing my culinary journey. Remarkably, not the birthday cakes of varying degrees of difficulty I have lovingly baked over the years,  nor the innovation I have demonstrated when using up the oddest of OddBox vegetables for tarts and flans. And, weirdly, not the gammon schnitzel I inadvertently invented…

My theory is simple: the single most important factor influencing his enjoyment of frankly any meal is not how long it took to make, where you found your ingredients, which techniques you employed or whether you were the perfect host or not. It’s literally the fact that he hasn’t had to cook it himself. Which is just as well because it’s beans on toast for dinner again tonight.