Neither of us is given to snacking. We just don't feel the need to nibble anything between our meals. We're too busy doing things, and we don't feel hungry or the urge to eat other than at our regular mealtimes. And we eat only two meals a day. We have a full breakfast and a hearty dinner, and that does us just fine, and has for decades. To some it may seem strange, but this is the way we have ordered our daily life. For me, it happened when I had three infants one and a half years apart, and had no time to indulge in lunch for myself. While the children were eating their lunch I was reading to them.

For my husband, it happened later and much more gradually. By the time he was ready to retire from work he no longer felt the appetite to indulge in eating anything at midday, and that grew into a match for my own abstention; not deliberate but a perceived lack of need, both of us finding we didn't at all miss having lunch halfway through breakfast and dinner.

When we have company, people staying with us, then we prepare lunch but don't feel inclined to take part in it, since we're absent the appetite for it, other than to share tea. When it's our own children staying over with us on a visit they just busy themselves making their own lunch.

We do have fruit, but as an accompaniment to our meals; various types of melons and banana for each of us at breakfast time, and an assortment of fruits to conclude dinner. That would include, grapes, cherries, blueberries, persimmons, strawberries, raspberries, peaches, plums, pears, clementines, mangoes, pineapple, for example, but never that mainstay of fruits, apples. Unless they're baked, which my husband enjoys; baked apple or apple pie or apple crisp.

And those concoctions are done only once a week when we indulge in having one baked product for dessert, whether cupcakes of various types, or fruit pies, or cakes, or raised-dough products like Chelsea buns. My husband's 79th birthday is on the near horizon and for that occasion I'll bake a chocolate cake, his favourite, and fill it with whipped cream.

Yesterday I thought I'd use some apples to produce a dessert because they'd been around awhile. I sliced four large applies unpeeled into a glass baking dish, sprinkled cinnamon, cloves and brown sugar around the slices and put them in the microwave for a few minutes to partially cook. Then I prepared a batter of 1/4 cup Becel margarine, 1/3 cup granulated sugar, one large egg, 1/3 cup of sour cream, vanilla, rum flavouring, 1 cup sifted cake and pastry flour with 1 tsp baking powder added and a dash of salt. I added Thomson raisins to sprinkle over the apples, then poured the cake batter over the apples and baked it until puffed and browned on top in our little countertop convection oven.

It made a nice light-enough and quite delicious finish to dinner last night.