That’s my Aunty Mary who suffers from Alzheimer’s looking delighted to be holding the newborn ‘Jimmy the giant courgette’ and in the photo above, Zoe and Joe are gazing at Jimmy in adoration.

Jimmy arrived in the summer, a gift from my cleaner Geraldine who thought I would be able to make good use of him in a soup or a pakora but as soon as Zoe-the-daughter held him she decided he must become a baby.

You may well think she’s mad but there was something about his baby weight that brought out the maternal instincts.

Jimmy was duly dressed in charity shop baby-wear, given eyes and a dummy (or soother as my American friends would say) and off we went to visit Aunty Mary.

Aunty Mary lives in a dementia care home and I have to say that all the ladies there couldn’t get enough of Jimmy. They all wanted to hold him, bounce him gently in their arms and sing him lullabys. They knew he was a vegetable but still they loved him.

One of the staff members noticed what was going on and said she thought the residents may respond well to those new born baby dolls that teenagers are given to show them just how demanding a baby is. Obviously, the screaming and crying mode would have to be disabled.

Then yesterday I met Elizabeth when I was cooking with my brother for the Grassroots Food Bank Christmas market. Elizabeth leads a branch of the Mother’s Union and she was telling me how her team were going to make bags with fiddly bits (buttons and ribbons and the like) for dementia sufferers. I told her how bags can be a bit of a problem as more than one bag can cause panic. We had to throw out all my Aunt’s bags apart from one to stop her searching for them all, worrying about what was in them, what was lost. Aunty Mary now has one bag which she keeps with her all the time (even in bed) and I would be reluctant to let her have another one. So I told Elizabeth about Jimmy the courgette and suggested making the bags into babies possibly filled with wheat that could be heated in the microwave.

This morning I did a bit of googling and found that lifelike babies had been given to dementia patients before with great success. Here’s all about it

And here’s a few pictures of John and I serving up our lentil and potato stew with dumplings and beef and onion flatbreads with carrot salad – two more of the recipes in my little cookbook. A good day all round.