The idea was in motion - I’d planned the contents of my welcome packs, the first recipe cards and found a good place to advertise. So I figured, I had it made…….it was about the time Jamie Oliver started on his School Dinners campaign so kids and food were being propelled into the media spotlight.

The ads went out and I waited eagerly in anticipation for the first phone calls and orders. And the phone calls came - 20 os so queries in the first week which wasn’t bad as I’d advertised locally. But it wasn’t what the parents wanted.

Call after call came requests for somewhere to send the children to learn to cook. Excuses for not wanting to help them learn at home were varied - “…not enough time”; “can’t cope with the mess….”; “I just want someone else to teach them…”. And therein was my biggest stumbling block. Parents simply didn’t want to spend one afternoon a month helping their child to learn to cook - a pretty essentil life skill.

On the next round of enquiries, I made a point of saying that the recipes were for the whole family - Baked Cod with Three Cheeses, for example. This wasn’t a course teaching kids to make Krispie Cakes, it was about seasonal wholesome food. And people gradually started to enroll their children on our postal cooking course.

Wow, my first step into the world of blogging! One I’ve considered for a long time but just haven’t found the time to do.

A little bit about myself first. My name’s Dani and I’m a 33 year old mother of two girls. The eldest is 13 in April and the youngest will be 4. My husband is a surgeon, months away from finishing his training job and ready to apply to be a consultant.

I work part time as a Matron in main theatres at our local hospital. Although I enjoy the varied aspects of that work (and it was that work that allowed me to meet my husband!) my true passion is children’s cooking. So for the rest of my life, I run my children’s cooking website, www.cottagecooks.co.uk.

Cottage Cooks was started in June 2004, when my eldest daughter was 10 years old. I’ve always been an avid cook and she takes after me in that respect - not only did she like making cakes but she could knock out a better roast dinner at 10 years old than her father could!! I tried to find a suitable cooking course for her to attend - I wanted her to learn different dishes and extend her skills beyond what I felt I could teach her.  But it had to fit in with her other commitments and above all, it had to be fairly close by.

And that was the sticking point……living in rural Devon, there just weren’t any kids cooking schools close by. I spent a couple of months bemoaning this fact to my husband who blithely suggested that I set up my own cooking course. I knew exactly what I wanted and as an “ordinary mum”, I felt that there would surely be lots of other mums out there looking for the same thing.

So Cottage Cooks was born.