If you have a fussy child who infinitely prefers anything offered in a restaurant to what your meagre cooking and time can produce, then I have at last discovered the solution for you.

I CAN cook. I’m my single days I used to seek out recipes and ingredients and whip up exotic stuff with quinoa and smoked paprika (I lived in London.) When dating my now husband he and I used to enjoy creating lovely meals to enjoy together, and if they ever turned out badly, the couple of bottles of wine served with dinner usually drowned out the memory.

But then we had kids. Plus our jobs. Dinner instantly became whatever could be knocked up in the bare few moments between nappy changes, feeds and persuading somebody small that they must be ready for bed because we certainly were.

Fast food, take away meals and, frankly, not cooking became the norm. Kids rarely give waiters any lip and so eating out was one way to make sure we didn’t all live off fish fingers.

But I longed to be a “proper” mum – an advert mum – whose arrival at the table with a steaming casserole dish would be greeted with Hurrahs. I made a few safe seeming meals – mild curry, hotpot and so on.

These were universally rejected as horrible (they weren’t horrible) and, insultingly, not as nice as nursery or school dinners.

This boiled my bonce. Lancashire schools have an amazing range of options for kids. I know for a fact that items like Spanish Paella or Tikka Goujins are routinely wolfed down by the little tikes, so it’s not the “exotic” nature of the dishes that’s causing the issue. Plus, aged five my child could order a chicken korma and pilau rice in an Indian restaurant and scoff the lot.

In a moment of desperation I reverted to my mother’s cooking – and discovered the answer to my problems.

This:

In my childhood my mum was no gourmet chef. Doing Dinners was and is one of her least favourite jobs. A thankless task on little money and less time, creating family meals every day of the week, three times a day was not her life’s calling. I can still remember the thrill when we finally got a freezer and could just get out burgers, or oven chips.

Her other secret weapon was the packet sauce. As an adult I became a bit snooty about these, believing I could create something just as good from scratch. And I can. But the trouble is that to a small child, something made from scratch just doesn’t taste… processed enough.

So I grabbed a Chicken Chasseur packet mix and followed the instructions and an hour later watched in amazement as my family gobbled it down. Also in mild irritation because my home cooked meals had been made WITH LOVE.

But this meal had been made with Schwartz and that, it transpired, was the key.

I now have a cupboard full of the things. Schwartz and Colman are my best friends. I can’t believe Jamie’s never mentioned this in his bid to get mums to cook more. “Bung this in,” he could say. “Shove in a load of lovely veggies and it’s pukka.”

And the stuff you can get is quite surprising when you start looking into the packets available. I mean, braised red cabbage? Just like mum used to make! Probably exactly what she used to make, I now realise. And how about this??

It almost couldn’t be better. So put down that takeaway menu and start home cooking. Just make sure you tell your kids it came from a packet.