So asking one of the lads how he was going to be spending his weekend a few weeks back he informed me, he and his lady would be doing some cooking on the Saturday. This I felt was a good answer. Of late they have taken up the noble challenge of building on their cooking skills, picking up a cookery book and building a repertoire of dishes. To see them carefully follow instructions putting together a tasty chicken pasta dinner on Saturday was a pleasure, carefully executing each step with military precision. Learning to cook is perhaps the singular skill I can clearly map out my improvement in. Cooking for myself, developing my tastes and adding ‘relatively self-sufficient’ to my list of attributes are all worthwhile endevours and to give up a Saturday morning to making a pot of soup or preparing a slow cooked dish that can be reheated unapolgetically during the following days is making good use of your time. I still worry when cooking for others, and like to test run meals at times for myself. The fear however of not knowing if a piece of meat is properly cooked is diminished, you get more confident in your willingness to stray from a recipe, browsing shelves wondering if ingredients will work while deglazing and folding become techniques not too scary a prospect .

This week Delia Smith releases a book on the art of cheating in cookery with its pre release sale figures breaking all previous records so that it will be one of the biggest publishing events of our time. Now Smith is one of the central figures in British cookery, revered for her demonstrations in all the basics of cooking and seen as a hall mark of procedural classical cookery and distinctly of an age when cooking was not as sexy as it is today. Her comeback is the topic of much discussion as her book has gone the route of quick and convenient ways to aid and assist us find the time to make meals in our hectic lives. Controversy has reared its head in the form of ingredients including tinned chopped onions, frozen mashed potatoes and chopped mince meat appearing in the book. The book is full of short cuts and cheats ways of getting meals on the table in speedy time. Now this follows on foot of Nigella Lawson’s similarly themed book and TV show last year in which she also raised much frowning from foodies for using products such as powdered mash potato and lime juice from a bottle, all in the spirit of accommodating her busy life and laziness. I watched the TV show and while there are recipes that are salvageable and ideas of use, the practices on show in both Smith’s and Lawsons work represent people picking the easy and lazy option as opposed to the smart one. Weekday evenings are not a pleasant time, you can be hungry, tired and after a bad day during which work and interaction with unpleasant people was required. I will absolutely not want to tackle anything complicated or long, yet neither do I want to eat a ready meal that leaves a taste of salt and not much else in my mouth else in my mouth and ultimately leave me hungry again later. Nor do I want to follow the recommendations of this new breed of lazy chefs and thaw out frozen mash and use a tin of mince that Smith has researched and confidently states she has scientifically proven contains 75% meat (what about the other 25, I ask you) to make a Shepherd’s Pie. If I want a Shepherd’s Pie I will wait until the weekend - I will brown the mince in batches, finely chop the onions and mash the spuds to creamy happiness - how could a batch of defrosted spuds match the satisfaction of eating those you have mashed yourself. Surely now in an age where cooks often seem to want to entertain more than cook, Delia should be returning to the scene reclaiming her throne as the sanctity of good cooking instead of selling out to how we convince ourselves we have no time for anything these days and plugging products from over priced supermarket chains. Weekdays, practicality is needed, lazy cop outs on quality is not?

A chop flattened with a rolling pin will cook in super fast time, pasta and rice taken 10 minutes of unattended cooking while fresh vegetables can be bulked up in volume replacing the need for spuds and are cooked in less than 5 minutes. Preparation and smart shopping also can’t go a miss - tins of tomatoes, good use of left overs, cooking on a Sunday to last until Tuesday, freezing food - these don’t require that much effort. Chopping an onion can serve as a bit of therapy after work, wondering what constitues the remaining 25% of your can of mince is not a thought I want at the end of the day. Tasty meals can be achieved in short periods of time. Nigel Slater’s excellent book ‘Real Fast Food’ is both a good read and full of excellent ways to treat food, turn simple ingredients into tasty meals - I tell you the combination of some good bread, avocado, bacon and chopped tomatoes makes a happy meal on a Wednesday. My mate eats Weetabix on a weeknight for dinner, this is more commendable in my book than buying some processed sludge, and he commits some of his Saturday to beating egg whites and treating food properly. Doing good where you can as opposed to compromising constantly is surely something we should work towards when it comes to something we do every day.