.bad things 5

Cooking is one of the many things in this world that some people can make seem very easy to the untrained eye, but in actual fact is harder than giving birth to an eighty kilogram rhinocerous. Chris Keates explains why.

.It has been said…

That hunger makes good cooks.
Wrong. Personally I could be starving to death, but I'd rather eat my own foot than sample my own cooking.
It's not for want of trying, mind you. However, it just seems that everything I have ever tried to cook, ever, has rarely been anything short of a complete disaster.
I don't know how the Ready Steady Cook team manages. In just twenty minutes they can whip up mouth-watering culinary masterpieces, undaunted by the fact that the contestant has just upended their carrier bag to reveal an onion, a stock cube, an ounce of finest rolling tobacco, an old gym shoe and a piece of string. Needless to say that the same inspiration does not strike me when faced by the contents of our fridge on a bad day.
"Well Ainsley, I'm thinking of doing a raw broccoli sandwich, followed by half a swede dusted lightly with ground nutmeg dated best before September 1983… Gee, I hope I get time at the end to do something with the egg and half a raw carrot. As for the pot of something furry and quite possibly sentient, I'll think about that as we go along."
"Ooooh, we like a bit of that, don't we ladies and gentlemen, oooh yes indeedy…"
Errm,, no.
Even the simplest forays into the field of "cookery" for me tend to result in black crunchy things, pale stodgy things or lumpy, tasteless gloopy things.
For example, I have a teletubby-like fondness for custard, and thank God it now comes in easily microwaveable little pots: for this I am eternally indebted to Ambrosia. My efforts in the past to make my own have inevitably ended in failure.
On one occasion I tried sprinkling the custard powder over my crumble, adding hot water and then stirring (this is completely true). Needless to say that the result was less than edible.
Even more recently, I was forced to attempt to make some real custard: I ended up with a pint of faintly yellow milk and a substance resembling rapidly setting lava in the bottom of the saucepan. I have a theory that supposedly academically accomplished people such as myself (ha ha!) as a species are totally useless when it comes to simple tasks such as cooking. We may be able to calculate pi to 1000 decimal places, but take us out of the lab and put us in a kitchen and we might as well be on an alien planet.
One of the things which annoys me most in the food world is pretentious menus. It seems obvious to me that this is basically ordinary food pretending to be something it's not. Why do restaurants have to invent ridiculous names for their food just so they can sound posh and drive the prices up? I was once fortunate enough to be dining in a very swanky hotel, where I ordered "Braised shanks of lamb nestled on a bed of creamed pomme de terre." What arrived was, to all intents and purposes, chops and mash. Grrr.
Another particular irritation is manufacturer's serving suggestions. In my opinion, a glossy picture of the product ON A PLATE does not constitute a valid serving suggestion.
Neanderthal man had it easy - either the fire was on or it was off. These days we have to contend with increasingly complicated, supposedly labour saving kitchen gadgets. I still haven't figured out how to use our grill - why do oven manufacturers insist on using zigzags, little circles and other depictions on the oven knobs that mean absolutely nothing to anyone? As for our fancy-pants microwave/convection oven combination thingy, the control panel looks like something you'd find aboard the latest NASA space mission. Personally, I'm sticking with the Kenwood toasted sandwich maker, circa 1978.
So as a I draw my rant about cookery to a close, I'm looking forward to going home to a sumptuous meal of haricots blancs, marinated in a jus de tomates, nestled on a bed of pain grillé in front of the telly.


By Chris Keates, currently barely alive, surviving only on a thin soup made from daisies, blu-tack, polystyrene cement and fourteen kinds of rice.