Who can be arsed to cook? After years of being kettled at home, working out what to have for dinner every day is a bleak and uninspiring process, which usually involves throwing a potato at the oven from three metres away.
Of course, there are solutions available for those with the cash. A Hello Fresh box with 82 components that promises to become Mexican chipotle chicken, or a sweaty Mc-Don-alds delivered by an exhausted guy on a bike who hates your guts. But mostly it’s just you and a bag of salad that went off last Thursday.
The bottom line is that I’m a very average home chef. In terms of culinary skill, I would say I’m slightly better than Denise from The Royle Family, but not that much better. I would love to be able to create wonders from leftovers, or know my way around a slow-roasted pork belly, but I find it all frustrating, boring and difficult. Put it this way, I can make dinner, but I do it with an anguished, puckered face like Therese Coffey doing karaoke, and afterwards I need a week off.
However, my lack of prowess in the kitchen doesn’t stop me from being both a highly discerning connoisseur and a ruthless critic of food programmes. As I sit there in my bra and pants guzzling Heinz ravioli in front of Food Network, I sound like Jay Rayner complaining about the amuse bouches at the George Cinq.
If someone’s mirror glaze turns into a sludge on Bake Off, then you can bet I will have something to say about it. And as I crack open yet another packet of Flipz chocolate coated pretzels (£1 at the Co-op) and settle down to watch Masterchef: The Professionals, you can probably hear me wisely muttering that the secret to great cooking is that you can never use enough butter. Oh yes, as long as I don’t have to actually go in a kitchen and make anything edible, I’m practically Anthony Bourdain.
But there’s also great comfort to be had in watching other people cook. These days I find myself inexplicably drawn to dusty old episodes of Nigel Slater’s Simple Suppers, which is so middle class it’s almost depraved. If Nigel needs some culinary inspiration he does not go in search of a Pot Noodle. No, he has a walled garden wherein he grows his own mulberries, radishes and cavolo nero, which he effortlessly incorporates into supper (he is too posh to say dinner).
