All cooking dilemmas were solved when I found COOK, says KATHERINE MacALISTER.

Impromptu dinner party for eight, a house full of kids, exhaustion, a hangover and a sense of humour failure. Cue COOK, the new Summertown ready-made food emporium where you just drive up, purchase, leave, heat up and relax.

So instead of trawling through your recipe books trying to summon up some vague sense of enthusiasm, disconsolately pushing a trolley round the supermarket to buy ingredients you’ve never heard of and then getting home and spending a whole day making something people will eat in five minutes, all seemed a bit beyond me.

Jamie Oliver might be able to feed an entire nursery school on some double-sided sticky tape and a few weeds he found in the playground in under five minutes, but for us mere mortals, dinner parties can be a marathon, and on this occasion I wasn’t up to the challenge.

So I nearly wept with gratitude when first of all a parking space miraculously appeared outside the COOK shop in Summertown, and then on entering I realised all my problems were over. In fact, you need never cook again, because everything from babyfood to Christmas, romantic dinners to parties are covered. Dinner party for 99? No problem, just grab a freezerful of salmon and asparagus gratin or coq au vin and a chocolate and raspberry roulade, shove it in the back of the car, hurtle off home before anyone notices and bung it in the oven as your guests pull up outside.

And if you don’t want them to know that it’s not the fruit of your loins, you can even buy a matching ceramic dish to place said frozen casserole in, so that when you serve it they are none the wiser. Genius.

In fact I’ve only got one question for COOK. What took you so long?

Needless to say I had no such qualms. So pleased with myself I was almost purring, I proudly displayed my purchases to anyone who would listen, revelling in my cleverness as if I’d invented a cure for cancer or the potato peeler. So will I do it again? Is Jordan going to remarry? Of course I will, although not every day. My children’s nervous systems would fail without their rationed diet of fishfingers and pasta. But when you want to cook something amazing but don’t have the energy, it’s perfect.

But a word of warning, you might feel a bit of a cheat. While everyone’s exclaiming how wonderful the food is, it doesn’t give you that nice warm feeling inside because you can’t take any of the credit. And carrying the empty boxes of Moroccan Spiced Lamb Tagine (£17.95 for four), minted couscous (£2.99 for two) and Normandy apple pie for 10 (£13.99) to the bin afterwards, you do feel a bit sheepish.

But if that’s the worst thing that can happen, I have no doubt that COOK will thrive in Oxford because it’s cheaper than a take-away and costs about the same as cooking it yourself. As my son would say – ‘no brainer mum.’ * The COOK shop is at 237 Banbury Road, Summertown. Customers can also call, place and pay for an order over the phone. The food will then be brought out to the customer in the car park behind the store