"I wish I were having dinner at Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland. When I was last there, the food was just divine and all sourced locally, so there was salmon and venison and locally reared beef and lamb. You always feel at Gleneagles, which is near Crieff in Perthshire, that you are staying at someone's country house, but with knobs on!
The quietness is wonderful, and the air so fresh that you are ravenous at every meal. I had some wonderful smoked salmon and Scottish beef, washed down with copious quantities of good wine. Even the tap water is delicious there. Scottish cream and raspberries for pudding, too. Perfect.
But I'm not, so. . . I'm about to cook supper for my three sons and myself. They are 22, 20 and 18 years old and all home for the summer. They eat so much that the cost of the trip to the supermarket breaks the ATM which I have to plunder at the door. Massive meals are cooked by me every day, in my Aga, or currently in my Aga module, which is a glorified electric cooker and which looks like a tiny Aga. I turn off the real Aga in the summer. At the moment, I'm doing fishcakes and salad, and things like meatballs in sauces, pak choi and noodles and all sorts of tasty stuff.
If I were on my own, I'd have a little salad, but you can't give that to boys. It wouldn't fill their pinkies (Scottish for smallest finger). I'll also have to rustle up a pudding of some description too, just to fill a hole."
In conversation with Marie-Claire Digby
Singer Barbara Dickson plays the National Concert Hall, Dublin, on Wednesday and the Waterfront Hall, Belfast, on Thursday. Tickets from the National Concert Hall, www.nch.ie