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So, Spud asked for a piece on eggs – and since we’ve not got any episodes coming up featuring ovoids (unless you count the Gordon Ramsey souffle episode coming in a few weeks), I thought I’d share some info on boiled eggs.

First up, a question that I’ve looked into a couple of times – are soft-boiled eggs really likely to give you salmonella?

How many eggs are infected?

Quite what the likely salmonella incidence in eggs is is a complicated question. An FSA study in 2007 showed a .38% incidence of salmonella – however, that was in cooked eggs served in restaurants and other catering places. (The same study warns that it’s best to be careful with egg product from Chinese takeaways and restaurants, which showed a very high tendancy to store eggs at ambient temperatures and pool eggs). It’s very hard to find out what the incidence of salmonella in UK eggs is – there aren’t any figures on the FSA site.

However, Andrew Wadge, Chief Scientist of the FSA, at one point refers to the UK’s having 10 times less salmonella in eggs than they found in foreign egg samples, implying an infection rate of about 1 in 300 boxes. However, the foreign egg survey also showed that 157 of the cases they found were salmonella on the outside of the egg only, with only 10 being salmonella inside the egg – and no details on how deep inside.

Given that salmonella on the shell will be killed immediately in a boiled egg, you’re talking about a 0.02% chance per box of eggs that there’s salmonella, rather than Intel, inside one of them (assuming you’re using a UK egg).

In the US, the Department of Agriculture did a survey in 2002 that showed there was an incidence of salmonella in 1 in 30,000 eggs produced in the US. That’s, erm, not very many (and almost exactly the same as my estimated UK incidence).

Harold McGee says that there’s basically no difference in infection rates between battery farmed eggs and free-range.

What precautions can you take?

The FSA and various other places advise that soft-boiled eggs aren’t safe – but the risk factor appears to be pretty darn low. Added to all the information above, whether or not the salmonella survives cooking depends on where it lies in the egg – because there’s a steep temperature gradient in boiled eggs, with the surface, obviously, getting pretty near boiling, the salmonella needs to be pretty deep into the egg to not boil alive, even if you’re cooking a soft-boiled egg.

On a practical note, I’ve been eating soft-boiled eggs for quite a few years now, with, touch wood, no salmonella so far.

Of course, you should still store eggs in a refrigerator – there’s no downside to doing that, and it prevents the growth of any salmonella that might be there. And as Heston Blumenthal and various other people point out, you should always wash your hands after handling raw eggs in their shells, because there’s actually far more likely to be salmonella on the shell than inside.

If you really want to be 100% sure, and you’re either fairly patient or have a sous-vide setup, you can pasturise eggs. Just stick them in a water bath at 57 degrees centigrade for 75 minutes for a large egg (thanks Douglas) – you can find out more in the Practical Guide to Sous-Vide. That’ll kill everything in there without coagulating the protein – although it may alter the taste and texture a bit. McGee mentions that you can also buy pre-pasturised eggs, although I’ve not seen them in the UK.

Of course, if you’ve got a sous-vide setup, you can also just cook your boiled eggs using it. Bruno Goussault, who more or less invented sous-vide, says that the perfect temperature to cook eggs is 64.5 degrees Centigrade. I must admit, I’ve tried cooking eggs sous-vide a couple of times, and the results have been a bit disappointing – but that’s a topic for another post. One thing that’s certain is that an egg held at 64.5 degrees for a few minutes will definitely be bacteria free.

So…

No, it’s not very likely that you’ll get salmonella from a soft-boiled egg, although it’s not impossible. It’s a non-zero chance, so if you’re feeding eggs to young children, adults with weakened immune systems, or anyone else who might die of salmonella infection, it might be best to be cautious.

But for a healthy adult, given the infection rates I’ve mentioned above, you’d have to eat a soft-boiled egg every day for a little under 100 years to even have an odds-on chance of encountering one contaminated with salmonella. And even then, there’s a good chance that the bacteria would die in the cooking process, or you’d just fight off the infection.

Hurrah. Back to the egg-n-soldiers for me.

Various Kamikaze Cookery bits…

We have a Facebook group! Yes, join us in our, erm, booking of faces .

The weekly Egullet conversation – this week, it turns out that we accidentally managed to buy the Rolls Royce of blenders.

No, we still haven’t managed to find the perfect quiet electric kettle .

And if you were wondering whether the Bamix does just as well in a crappy plastic beaker – I tested this morning.

Fruit

Fruit tastes okay, and many don’t produce any washing up. Remember that you need to eat fruit to avoid scurvy. The downside is that they’re sometimes difficult to get into, and normally produce some sort of litter (apple cores, skins etc.).

If you’re really lazy you can get the vitamin C you need to live from Fruit Juice drinks They’re quite cheap at the lower value end, especially value orange juice. However, you probably miss some sort of goodness from doing this, so if you’re really lazy just stick to apples, pears and tangerines, they’re easy enough to eat, and don’t cost that much.

Staples

Staple foods bulk out your meals. They normally don’t taste that good, but they’re okay. Here’s some advice on the common ones:

Rice
Rice is cheap, and generally tastes okay, but it really goes best with a meal with sauce. It can take a bit of effort to get the cooking time right as well; It’ll be crunchy and not quite edible if you leave it too short, and watery and unpleasant if you cook it for too long. Finally cooking rice involves a sieve and a pan, both of which will be covered in a tough, glue like substance if you don’t wash them straight away. Not the win.

Pasta
I’ve never liked this as much as rice, it’s bland as hell, and also really needs a sauce to make it taste half decent. However, it’s cheap and easy to cook, and doesn’t gum your stuff up anywhere near as badly as rice.

Potatoes – an old enemy.
Potatoes can be baked, roast, boiled, or fried. Especially baked and with butter and cheese they can actually taste quite nice. They’re also extremely cheap when bought in large quantities. You may wish to be careful how much you buy though.

At one point during lean times, Hugh persuaded me to buy 10 kilograms of potatoes at a tiny price, to make sure I was fed. After about 3 weeks of eating nothing but potatoes, I was thoroughly sick of them. I left the remaining 9 kilos in the cupboard thinking I’d want to eat them later. Now, potatoes, if left in a warm dark place, surrounded by organic matter (such as other potatoes) have a habit of growing. By 1 month in, our entire flat stank of potatoes, and a sizable potato plant had taken hold of the cupboard. Man, that was a pain in the arse to get rid of!

Bread
Bread is the student’s friend. It’s already cooked, you can put paté or cheese on it, or use it to hold the meat you’ve just fried. It’s pricey, and goes off quick, but it’s by far the easiest staple to use.

Various people have suggested it might be useful to have Alex’s Being A Student guide all together in one place, so here it is!

If you can think of someone or somewhere that might benefit from his studenty wisdom, please do let them know!

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It’s at around this time of year that loads of people will be moving away from home for the first time to take up university studies. Now I remember when I started my university life, I didn’t know the first thing about cookery, and frankly didn’t care to learn (that came about 3 years later). I was, however, required to somehow keep myself alive during this period, on not much money.

There were lots of student cookbooks, (my parents duly bought me one), but all of these seemed to want you to do things like use more than one ingredient, use herbs, measure things properly, and other such annoying time consuming stuff.

So over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be explaining some of the dos and don’ts of minimalist student cookery. The aim of this endeavour is to eat in a survivable way, very cheaply, with minimal effort, and without everything tasting minging.

1: Cooking, Washing up, and Student culinary life in general.

Yep, it’s that time of the week – the latest Kamikaze Cookery episode is available, and this time, we’re taking on… blenders.

Watch it over on the episode page or right here:

It must be a nightmare being a kitchen technology company. By and large, cooks are really pretty closed to the idea of new tech – even someone like me buys a new piece of kitchen technology incredibly rarely, and would far rather spend money on a cookbook the size of Belgium than, say, an exciting new blender. And then you’ve got the aesthetic crowd – who would rather replace their stovetop kettle in black with a pink kettle to match the walls than, you know, actually buy something that boils water fast.

The Bamix blender (£89.99 or therabouts) we feature in the episode really is the mutt’s nuts – it’s astonishingly good. But I’d have never bought one if we hadn’t wanted to test it for the episode. And it’s reminding me how much other cool kitchen tech there is out there that I’ve just not touched.

For example, the Tefal Actifry – apparently it’s an astonishingly good alternative to deep-frying that uses a tiny amount of fat. I’ve heard various people raving about them, but have I even seriously considered buying one? Hell, no.

Or the various halogen ovens (couldn’t find a useful link for these). Again, I’ve heard rave reviews. Apparently they’re pretty close to being a new way of cooking – we’re talking roast chicken in 15 minutes, plus pretty lights on your countertop. Have I bought one? Have I bollocks.

I’m a huge coffee fan. But have I bought myself a vacuum coffee maker, despite the fact that they supposedly make the best damn cup of coffee in all creation? Not so much.

And to that, add the fact that kitchen gadgeteers have to compete with lab equipment manufacturers and even hardware stores getting some of our hard-spent food money – it must be a pretty tough life.

(Unless you make a silent kettle – or a so-called silent one. Those things sell like hot cakes despite not being all that much use. No idea why.)

No wonder some of them have started coming up with pretty unconventional tactics to sell their product.

Any kitchen gadgets you’ve been thinking of buying, but just haven’t gotten around to? Anything exciting that you think everyone should aquire?

This is a piece from the archives a while ago on the subject of Heston Blumenthal’s bolognaise (which is awesome)- I thought it might be interesting in light of this week’s bolognaiseness…

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So, just before Christmas I aquired a copy of Heston Blumenthal’s In Search of Perfection , where the genius chef behind The Fat Duck explores 8 different classic British dishes and attempts to come up with a recipe for them that gets as close as possible to his idea of perfection.

(I’m not going there. He knows perfection’s not possible. You want more, read the book.)

Several reviewers have described his recipes as being far too complex for anyone to actually cook. I then proceeded to describe their reviews as “bollocks”. And to prove it, over Christmas, my mother and grandparents agreed to act as guinea-pigs for a try-out of Heston’s recipe for Spaghetti Bolognaise.

His recipe is reasonably traditional, but complex, boiling down over a kilo of onions and another kilo of tomatoes, plus a list of about 20 ingredients, over three distinct stages of preparation and about 10 hours. Given that I’d probably say that I can cook a Bolognaise better than any other dish, and my version’s evolved from one that my mum taught me – one that can be cooked in about an hour – "Perfection"’s recipe was up for a challenge.

The credit crunch is everywhere these days. You can’t open a newspaper without being beset by “Ten ways to maintain your beauty regime using only household chemicals” or “Holiday destinations for the destitute”. Myself, I’ve got no money so I’ve got nothing to lose: the only effect the global financial crisis has had on me is that last week, when I went into the bank, the cashier called me “sir” and asked me if I’d like a candy. I asked if he could give me a better interest rate instead of wasting money on sweets, then I took the proffered Werther’s Original and completed the transaction in the resultant stony silence.

Only now the financial crisis has reached the food press as well. The demigodlike A A Gill devotes two thirds of his column to advice for restauranteurs during a global downturn. The Observer‘s Food Monthly supplement devotes five pages to the mystery of egg price rises. The Times has a two-page article on how overpriced organic food is doomed, or maybe it isn’t (will the overpriced allegedly quiet electric kettle follow? Place bets now.). No one seems to really know one way or the other.

On the one hand, it’s probably time for all of us to cut out the expensive dinners and the overpriced panini. On the other hand, we still have to eat two or three times a day, and one of the best ways to feel better during a depression—economic or mental—is a nice steak pie or a hearty stew. So maybe the quality of the food is going to become more important than the price.

What does everyone else think? Is it back to leftovers and lobscouse for us all, or will trendy eateries become even more of a status symbol than they already are?

You can now buy yourself a fine Kamikaze Cookery apron from the shop ! So, if you want to prevent your front being covered in hot, wet or caustic things, now you can do it in Kamikaze Cookery style!

(Plus, we’ve still got mugs, T-Shirts, bags, and all that stuff too. No, we don’t have a KKC-branded quiet electric kettle yet.)

So. Jamie Oliver. What have we learned?

In the episode, we discovered the following things:

• He’s a mockney prat.
• Despite being one of the famous-est chefs on the planet, he doesn’t actually tell you anything interesting that you can use to make ragu with.
• The recipe was bland and basic, and it still took four hours to make.
• Recipe books, it would seem, are only any good if you already know how to cook.
• Did I mention he was a mockney prat?

I stand by my ad hominem remarks. They add colour and—I hope—humour to an article that would, otherwise, be a long whinge about celebrity culture. They act like the seasoning that was woefully lacking in Jamie’s ragu. And they’re valid—-even if Jamie taught you how to cook like Ferran Adrià, he’s still got one of those faces you just want to hit. (Apparently Channel 4 viewers agree with me.)

Any normal person trying to find out about cooking would have sweated away in a hot kitchen for some hours, and at the end would have been rewarded only by that (not insignificant) warm glow you get when you’ve actually finished making something all by yourself. The food itself was certainly nothing to shout about: the sauce tasted like sauce from a jar, and the pasta was slightly less impressive than you’d get out of a packet. Any member of the Findus Crispy Pancakes generation would have wondered what all the fuss was about. Having said that, after four hours we were hungry.

I’ve since experimented a bit with the recipe, and found that it benefits from a couple of tweaks: for instance, I add nutmeg. Hugh has an excellent list of things you should do to ragu, which includes a few other things I’m going to try.

Maybe it’s not all celebrity chefs, though. Maybe it’s just Jamie, and some of the others are quite good. Fear not, for the science is not finished yet. Armed with the qualitative data from our Jamie test, we’re next going to see how he compares to other celebrity chefs. Coming up later in the series we’ve got all-new Normal People set against Nigella Lawson and Gordon Ramsay.

Also, there’s been some discussion to the effect that the recipes in Jamie’s Italy come from stuff he’s stolen from the Italians, and aren’t actually Jamie’s recipes at all. Does anyone think we should offer him a rematch?

Right. Ragu sauce, aka Bolognaise Sauce.

Having ragged on Jamie’s gu (ooer), I feel I should throw my own hat into the red, bubbling, aromatic ring. So – what do I think should be done to improve Jamie’s ragu?

The short answer would be “I think it should be Heston Blumenthal’s ragu”. I’ll post a piece from the archives on cooking Heston’s Spag Bol on Tuesday. Despite the 8 hours it takes to cook, and the considerable cost of ingredients, Heston’s “Perfect” Spag Bol is indeed the finest example of the breed I’ve ever tasted, and ranks as one of the nicest-tasting meals I’ve ever cooked anywhere.

However, assuming that you don’t have 8 hours? Then here are five tips to spice up Jamie’s bland ragu:

Brown the damn meat . Jamie just chucks the meat in with the sauce. This is like putting up a sign saying “I don’t like flavour. Please make my ragu blander than Gordon Brown’s sex life.”. (I’m assuming here.) As you’re probably all sick of me saying by now, browning your meat stimulates the Maillard reactions, which cause an immensely complex cascade of flavour-producing reactions. I have no idea whatsoever why Jamie doesn’t do this – it’s just insane not to.

Add celery and carrot . The soffrito, the standard Italian package of vegetables added at the start of the meal, normally contains more than just onion and garlic. Exactly what’s in there is the subject of much debate and a certain number of Medieval city-state wars, but two of the most common ingredients are carrot and celery. There’s a reason for that – it’s that they make the taste of the ragu much richer and more complex. Both are, interestingly, from the same family of plants, and according to Harold McGee, add a “warm, woody” note to dishes, which is seriously lacking from Jamie’s effort. I also find the slight astringency of the celery adds something. By the way, if you hate celery and are going “eew” right now – most people don’t use celery right. Don’t use it as a vegetable. Use it as a herb.

Add milk Yes, milk. I normally add a bit in with the meat, after the onion and garlic are softened. Heston Blumenthal says that the proteins and sugars in the milk react to give the ragu extra body, and I could believe that. It also adds a bit of fat, which is something that’s definitely needed (see below). It’s also classic Italian, so it makes it doubly surprising that Jamie doesn’t include it. I first heard about this on “America’s Test Kitchen”, where they concluded that it made the best pasta sauce.

Add something sweet, something salt, something acid, and something fishy In Heston’s case, he adds Thai fish sauce, which is very fishy indeed, and sherry vinegar for the sweetness. I’ve tried that, but I find if you’re cooking just for one person, it’s very easy to get his flavourings out of whack. Instead, I tend to add a dollop of Oyster Sauce and a little bit of red wine vinegar – this one I’ve not seen anywhere, and it’s certainly not classical Italian, but it’s very nice, and gives a similar effect. Certainly, you should always add something slightly sweet to tomatoes – Harold McGee verifies that flavour chemists have tested and found both sugar and acidity intensify the flavour of tomatoes.

Add fat Heston’s Spag Bol uses about a ton of butter. I’d like to live past 35, so I tend to stir in a bunch of olive oil just before serving. This is an adaption of the technique Heston’s using, which is the French Monte Au Buerre, meaning “lift with butter”. Frankly, I prefer my approach for general use – Heston’s produces a very rich, heavy, filling sauce, wheras the olive oil is lighter and adds a fresh note to the proceedings.

There are dozens of other tips – add tomato leaves right at the end (intensifies flavour, again). Add stock. Serve with parmesan (really works). But, basically, if you can’t do better than Jamie’s ultra-basic ragu, you’re not trying hard enough.

There’s some interesting discussion of Normal Person vs Jamie going on elsewhere on the Web, so I thought I’d link to it.

Notably, egullet have (of course) a very interesting and learned discussion going on with a load of recommendations for celeb chefs I’ve not heard of, and at least one name that made me accidentally Google a porn star.

There’s also some interesting chat going on in my LJ entry

Both worth a read if you’re interested.

So, I’m curious – has anyone mentioned this on the official Jamie Oliver forums yet? If not, does anyone want to?

In this part, I’ll talk a bit about what to eat, and how to stay alive on little money and even less effort.

Meat

Meat doesn’t actually need any sauce or complex accompaniment to taste half decent. This is one of its major advantages for student cooking. It also normally only takes up one pan or oven, and can be cooked quickly (frying or grilling) or without too much supervision (roasting).

Okay, so some readers won’t eat meat at all, but frankly I’ve always been a carnivore and probably always will be. So here’s some of the things I learned about meat as a student:

Season meat – it makes it taste better. To season meat, cover it completely in as much seasoning as seems appropriate (easy to learn, after the first few tries) then cook it however you were going to anyway. Salt and Pepper is pretty much the easiest, cheapest seasoning available, but you can get specialised steak or chicken seasoning from supermarkets. Be warned, as these aren’t always an improvement on salt and pepper. Alternatively, you could experiment with a wide variety of different things¹.

Frying steak, pork chops and chicken legs and thighs are your friend.All of these are pretty cheap, half decent bits of meat which cook quite easily. Pork Chops will normally fry or grill, and Chicken Legs and Thighs will oven cook. A lot of my friends just bought chicken fillets, but these actually kinda cost a fortune, and probably don’t taste any better.

Watch out for turkey season. Now, this was always a (dubious) treat when I was in uni. From time to time, Turkey producers would have far too much turkey, and sell massive 1.5kg joints for about £4. This is a hell of a lot of food, is not unpleasant (at least, not until you’ve just consumed 1kg of it), and will keep you in turkey dinners, sandwiches, and if you’re feeling energetic² soup.

Gravy If you’re not a confident cook, do not attempt to make your own gravy; this is an advanced skill. However, if you put in some vegetables with meat you’re roasting, the juices can make them taste better.

Vegetables

It’s a time honoured tradition for students (especially male ones) to try to avoid eating any of these. I was no exception. However, about once a month I would get sudden cravings or feel ill and strange. At these times, I reasoned that perhaps my complete avoidance of vegetables was to blame. Here’s some of the ways you can get round the whole problem of eating vegetables:

Gorge on spinach. I’m ashamed to say it, but this was my first solution to the veg problem. About once a fortnight, I’d buy a large can of spinach, heat the contents in a saucepan then just eat the lot. This would be done independent of meals (I didn’t want to sully the meat).

Peas. Peas taste okay, require just a bit of boiling in a pan (which is then very easy to wash), and can accompany just about anything. They’re also cheap and come frozen in large amounts.

Can’t someone else do it? Let’s face it, vegetables with no effort applied don’t taste as good as meat does. However, they’re a lot cheaper. One way round the problem of cooking inability here is to just buy a salad or vegetarian dish from someone who knows how to make one (salad bars, supermarket, café’s etc.). It’s much cheaper than buying prepared meat.

Roast them with meat. Ah, now, this is actually a good solution. Vegetables don’t taste great, and involve extra effort, however, carrots, parsnips, onions and small potatoes take a similar time to roast as meat does. What this means is that for minimum extra effort you get to eat a bit more healthily. You do normally need to wash vegetables, but when roasting them you can normally leave most of the skin on. This occasionally produces a slightly bitter “rustic” taste, but you can grow to like it.

Alternative solutions. I heard of one guy with a porter’s job at a hospital taking to eating slightly out of date coma patient food. Once again, I wouldn’t advise it.

Next week I’ll talk about fruit and general staples, including the Potatoes of Doom story.

¹ I used to go with: Steak and Mustard (quite good), Chicken and Mixed herbs ³ (good), everything with Tobasco Sauce (results vary), Chicken with Irn-Bru (less good).
²,(which you won’t be if you’ve eaten nothing but turkey for the last 2 days)
³ They come in a box labelled “Mixed Herbs”

From Icanhascheezeburger

Yep, it’s that time – time for another episode!

This week, as he mentions below, Paul is rigorously testing Jamie Oliver’s cookbook-writing skills, though the medium of a guy called Steve, and a whole lot of pasta dough.

Watch it now!

If you like the episode, or any episode, if you fancied telling your friends/your social networking site of choice/the world about it we’d be really, really grateful. You can embed any of our episodes using the third button from the right on the Flash player. As I’ve mentioned before, our publicity budget wouldn’t buy a large pizza and fries, let alone a marketing campaign…

We love celebrity chefs here at Kamikaze Cookery. No, really, we do. I’m a particular fan of Nigella Lawson, although not, admittedly, for any reason relating to her food. All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, have a (sometimes grudging) respect for Heston Blumental. Naturally, Hugh is the only one crazy enough to have actually tried to cook one of his recipes. (I believe it took seventeen hours start to finish. Maybe he’ll tell you about it some time.)

And therein lies the rub. Heston tells you to take twenty kilos of tomatoes and peel them. This is easy for him. He’s got a laboratory and a team of highly trained staff to do the peeling for him, so he can swan in at the last minute, do something magical with an ultrasound gun, and take all the credit. An average person, we feel, would have given up on about tomato #3 and sent out for pizza instead.

It might be easier if the books told you how to peel tomatoes (soak them in hot water so that the skins swell, then they’re much easier to take off), but they don’t do that, either. You’re supposed to guess.

And then there’s the language used in the recipes themselves. What does it mean when it tells you to sweat the carrots? Isn’t `sweat’ an intransitive verb? Why doesn’t anybody tell us this stuff?

(I have a mental image now of a novice cook reading a book and then trying to force carrots out through his own pores. It’s not pretty.)

Most celebrity chefs started off as chefs. They’ve had years of training and they’ve forgotten what it’s like to walk into a kitchen and wonder which one of these things is the fishknife, or which end of the peeler you hold, or whether it’s a five-second or a ten-second rule for dropping things on the floor. Since cooking is easy for them, it must be easy for us, so they don’t bother to explain things.

I had the same problems with my maths lecturers at university, but that’s a subject for a whole different blog.

And everyone secretly knows this. We buy these glossy recipe books, ooh and aah over the luscious pictures for a few minutes, and then display them proudly on our bookshelves unused. They’re like that copy of A Brief history of Time or the complete works of Shakespeare: certificates displaying membership of the petit-bourgeoisie, not practical documents.

At Kamikaze Cookery, we like to cook stuff. We feel that recipe books are no help.

Such a bold assertion desires proof! Fortunately, we have a science-based cookery show. Now we have an observational hypothesis and it’s time to test it.

In this week’s episode, surprising almost exactly no one, we take on Jamie Oliver. As I discussed recently, Jamie’s back in the news of late, and while he’s being slightly cooler than he used to be, he’s still an arrogant little mockney prat. It has to be said, though, that he makes some good food and he wants to share it with the nation’s children. A noble goal, perhaps, but I’m fairly sure there are better ways to go about it than a reality television show.

We took a normal person, the sort who might buy one of these sleb-chef cookbooks or get one as a present from a well-meaning relative, and set out to discover whether it was possible to extract the food from the equation while leaving behind the rampaging irritance that Jamie smears over everything he does.

Along the way we read anecdotes about Jamie’s “housekeeper”, discovered interesting alternate spellings of simple words, and learned about the science behind pasta dough, which we cover in the episode. We’ve got more about dough coming up in a later video, when we cover a different celebrity chef. We found out which ingredients you can buy in a shop and which ones you have to travel to Italy for. We improvised kitchen implements and learned why pasta comes in packets.

And at the end, we sat down and had dinner, and after all that, it was quite nice. Isn’t that the point?