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I went hillwalking yesterday. It was -6° a mile above sea level in Dunkeld. I was wearing a space-age thermal underlayer and a fifteenth-century woollen cloak, and I had a lunch made of stuff from the Farmer’s Market and a thermos of miso soup, so I survived.

Back at the bottom of the hill, it was time for dinner. We got looked at funny in the snooty hotel in Dunkeld, so we opted for fish and chips. One of the things I learned very quickly when I moved to Scotland was how seriously they take their fish and chips. For one thing, it’s called a “fish supper”, and saying “fish and chips” will get you shunned. They’ll charge you a fortune and give you fish in specially-constructed cardboard boxes. Chip shops in Scotland turn into community centres, general stores that sell pet food and cigarettes. And that’s without even getting into the east coast–west coast sauce wars.

While I’m on the subject, let me just deal with the salt-an’-sauce issue once and for all. Chip sauce is disgusting. Fact. There is absolutely no justification whatsoever for drenching your supper in purple crap. The only possible reason that any sane human could enjoy that stuff is if they were brainwashed from an early age, which I gather is what happens pretty frequently on the east coast.

In the chip shop in Dunkeld, we got talking to the manager. He’d had the place for about two months and he was in the process of making some changes. That’s what I thought he said, but I was concentrating on this fantastic, moist, flaky fish with a delicate, crispy batter and chips cooked to perfection. I’m originally from Hull and I know my haddock. This stuff was great.

Apparently the fish came from Arbroath, which is about as close to Dunkeld as you can get while still being on the coast. The haggis, black pudding, and white pudding all came from the local butchers. The potatoes were English, but he said that they were the best ones available. About the only thing that wasn’t locally-sourced was the smoked sausage, which was Mattesson’s®, but as he said, “they’re the best ones”.

This was a guy who runs a chip shop in a small town in the middle of nowhere. He wasn’t exactly trying to compete with the Starbucks down the street, because there wasn’t one. And if there had been one, their fish and chips would have been awful.

Fish and chips is supposed to be cheap, drunken fodder for people who are too lazy to microwave a ready meal, not that there’s anything wrong with that. (Chilly hillwalkers who have just come down off mountains and want something hot, quickly, are given a free bye.) And here it had been elevated to restaurant-quality status. I would happily have paid fifteen quid for this if it had come on a plate, with cutlery made of metal, on a table with a tablecloth.

I’m not convinced about the business case for buying expensive ingredients in a chip shop, of all things. He’s the only such business in town; he’s not competing with anyone. But I’m very glad that’s what he’s doing. I’d spent the day gawping at scenery, enjoying the best of what Scotland has to offer, and he managed to make my day ten times better.

Is local-sourcing appropriate when it’s not strictly necessary? What does everyone else think?

As you may, possibly, have noticed, the credit crunch is upon us. The world has gone crunchy. And what that means, aside from gloomy news reports, worried-looking bankers, and really cheap holidays to Iceland, is a sudden plague of “five tips to eat frugally in the Crunch” posts.

It’s not like they’ve ever gone away, of course. Has anyone ever seen a “five tips for ways to spend that bit extra on food” post? “Five ways to blow your paycheck on a great meal”? “Five ways to actually spend some money on one of the most intense and universal pleasures available to man”? Nope. In the West, we’re guilty and rather angry about food. We’ll lap up any suggestion of how to spend less money on it, even if the economy’s booming and we’re all driving Lambourghinis with 60" plasma screens in them. But as soon as things get tight? Well hell, large parts of the New Puritan culture were just looking for an excuse to tell us all to eat nothing but oatmeal anyway.

Of course, right now a lot of people probably would like to save some money, and there are some good tips for saving cash without sacrificing pleasure, which I’ll get to next week. But they aren’t the tips that offend me. It’s the plethora of recieved-wisdom clams, usually combining incredible obviousness with an appetite for self-mortification that would have your average flaggelant order backing away and suggesting that hey, everyone needs to get roaring drunk and have inadvisable sex once in a while.

Here are three of these shitty parasitic suggestions that I’d really like to see abandoned somewhere cold and unpleasant:

“Avoid convenient things”

Well, OK, that’s not usually how the tipster phrases it. Instead, you’ll get crap like this, from ZenHabits:

Don’t buy plastic wrap, tin foil, sandwich bags, etc. For everything that you could think of needing – a sandwich baggy, tin foil, or other disposable nonsense – there is a non-disposable alternative. Use tupperware instead.

WHAT? Seriously now, look at the numbers a second. A 20m roll of aluminum foil from Sainsbury’s costs £2.59. I don’t know about anyone else reading this, but I can’t remember the last time I used up a full roll. Even if you’re wrapping food in the stuff every day, it takes, what, a 30cm length maximum to wrap something big, like a lamb shank. Maybe a meter if you’re wrapping a whole roast chicken – and damn, you’re going to need some serious Tupperware for that. So, yes, if you’re wrapping 20 whole chickens in foil every month, you could save £2.59 a month, in exchange for the usual irritations which are exactly why people use foil instead of Tupperware in the first place.

Clingfilm costs £2.45 for 100 meters. I’m not even going there.

This has nothing to do with living cheaper, and everything to do with bog-standard middle-class guilt over anything “disposable”.

“It’s much cheaper if you cook all your meals yourself”

Surely I can’t object to this one? I mean, it IS cheaper, right? And plus, everyone knows that takeaways and ready meals are EVIIIIL.

Well, yes, if you consider your time to be free. It’s also cheaper to wash clothes by hand rather than run a washing machine. It’s cheaper to wash dishes by hand rather than use a dishwasher, but if you try to take my dishwasher away, I will cheerfully economise in return by only stabbing you with the cheap knife.

It’s cheaper to cycle to work rather than take the car or public transport, but it’s interesting to note that the only people who do so are people who like cycling.

If you LIKE cooking, then cooking your meals instead of using ready meals or going out is a great two-for-one deal. Not only do you at least in theory save money, but you get to do something you enjoy.

But if you like cooking, what exactly are the odds of your reading a “Five tips” column, seeing this tip, and going “Oh, yeah! That’s what I’ve been missing!”? As opposed to, say, just feeling the tip’s bloody obvious to you, but probably very good for those poor benighted souls who never cook?

Right. Now you’re someone who doesn’t like cooking. It’s a pain. It’s a chore. You’d much rather be drinking/playing games/having sex/watching the sport of your choice/alphabetizing your bookshelves. In that case, you’re not cooking because it’s half an hour minimum of hard, unenjoyable work. And even if you’re on minimum wage, that’s about £3 worth of time.

Does cooking a chilli rather than buying a ready meal one save you £3? Well, a Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference Chilli and Coriander Rice costs £3.09. I’m a big fan of cooking, but even I wouldn’t try to claim that a chilli costs less than 10p to cook. (And for what it’s worth, I can’t see any ingredients on the Sainsburys chilli that make it any more unhealthy than the home-cook version).

Switching to cooking all your meals is NOT a quick cash-saving tip. It’s a major lifestyle choice. If you don’t like cooking, it makes about as much sense to try to cook all your meals as it does to hand-wash all your clothes.

(I’ll be going on about this more next week – there ARE simple cooking tips that can save cash even if you hate cooking, but a blanket “cook more!” isn’t one of them. )

“Save very small amounts of money whilst ruining something you like”

Possibly the stupidest tip I’ve seen (yes, even sillier than “don’t buy foil”) was from a site that I have mercifully forgotten, which advised that its readers could save money by “refreshing the grounds on your coffee”. Yes, once you’ve used your coffee grounds once, simply add a little fresh coffee and use them again! Save $$$$!

Now, I’ll confess I’ve done this from time to time. That’s not because I wanted to save $$$, but because I was being a slovenly bastard. But recommending it routinely? Are you insane?

For starters – no, this doesn’t make the same cup of coffee. It makes shitty coffee. Now, if you don’t mind or actively like the taste, then more power to you. But otherwise, if you actually like coffee, why would you do this to yourself?

Waitrose Columbian coffee beans, a rather nice roast that made the coffee I’m drinking whilst writing this, cost £3.49 per 500g. I’ve just measured, and one measure of coffee for one person’s mug is about 10g of beans. So, that’s 50 cups for £3.49, or 7.6p a cup.

(By the way – if it’s practical, “grind and make your own coffee rather than buying it from Starbucks” is an EXCELLENT cost-saving tip.)

Now, general advice is that once you’re past 5 mugs of coffee a day you’re leaving “I just like the taste” Crescent and entering “If you took it intravenously I’d have more tracks than Victoria Station” Boulevard. So, at absolute maximum, 5 mugs per day, you could save a stonking £5 per month for shittifying literally half the coffee you drink. At a more sane 3 cups a day, you’re talking more like £3 savings per month for screwing up something that clearly gives you pleasure.

That’s not a cost-cutting measure, that’s masochism.

And the same applies to re-using teabags, not buying the one nice steak a week, or even skipping out on the monthly restaurant meal with your spouse. Again, it’s a case of learning the difference between self-flaggelation and optimisation.

So is there no way you can save money?

Of course there is. For starters, you can substitute time for money in a lot of cases – but beyond that, there are tons of practical cost-saving measures you can adopt. (The same Zen Habits article I mentioned earlier also has a few good tips, like “Don’t shop hungry” and “Eat out intelligently by tracking special offers”). The important thing with any useful cost-cutting measure is that it has a benefit that vastly outweights its inconvenience.

But for most people, there are quite a few of these. That sandwich at work you don’t really like. That food you end up throwing away. Programmers will be familiar with the concept of “optimising” a system – not removing features, but just removing the junk that gets in the way and doesn’t provide a benefit. Cost-cutting ideas should do the same thing.

I’ll be putting my lack of money where my mouth is next week, with some, hopefully more useful tips.

But for now, what do you think? Have you gotten annoyed by “Five tips” articles? Do you know any good ones to share? Or do you think some of the tips here have a point?

P.S. Oh, yes.

"Shop at farmer’s markets because they’re cheaper than the supermarkets. "

Oh, come on. That’s just bollocks.

Regular readers will know that I’m a big Doctor Who fan. Inspired by Emo-Doctor’s amusing whingeing in this comic (and partly by the Tam of Rassilon), I wondered today: what would Time Lords eat at a Time Lord pizza party?

This is the kind of philosophical quandary that plagues me on a frequent basis. I’m deep like that.

Behold: the Pizza of Rassilon.

Welcome to all our new readers from BoingBoing, and I hope you’re enjoying the blog and show!

We’ve had, unsurprisingly, a lot of feedback from various people about the Normal Person vs Gordon Ramsay episode yesterday. (Those people who accused Johnnie of not being a real geek – good luck with that, and I hope you didn’t need root back on your machines any time soon…) The range of reactions has been fascinating, and I think really justified to me why we did this series in the first place.

(Other “Normal Person” episodes: Normal Person vs Nigella Lawson, and Normal Person vs Jamie Oliver)

Now, various people have suggested that the reason we didn’t have much luck with Ramsay’s episode was, to paraphrase, because “lol ur cookin nubs”. And that’s a fair challenge. Is it, in fact, the case that a really competent cook could have quickly and easily followed Ramsay’s recipe to a stunning success?

Well, I’m a pretty decent cook, and I wasn’t convinced I could. But then, one of our readers, who also happens to be a ridiculously experienced and knowledgable cook, offered to put the question to a scientific test.

His name is Stu, and this is his story…

—-

Hello! My name is Stu, and I can cook. And you should know from the start that I don’t like Gordon Ramsay. I think he’s a massive prick.

Now, cookery is manly. It helps you survive, and that’s manly. It helps support your loved ones, and that’s manly too. And I’m pretty manly. I go to the gym a lot, and lift weights in a manly way. I have a pretty geeky job — I’m a science and technology writer — and geekiness is manly. In the kitchen, I wield a massive, wickedly sharp Japanese knife with swirly patterns on it. That’s manly.

However, I freely admit that I’m not as manly as Gordon Ramsay. He’s so manly, his face is actually turning into a scrotum. He swears more than me, which I don’t really object to, but he insults and victimises people, which I do object to. He is, as I said, a massive prick, and you can’t get much more manly than that.

I also think his recipes are lousy. I tried his ‘easy watercress soup’ recipe once, and it didn’t work. I was quietly satisfied when Hugh and Co demonstrated that his recipe for goat’s cheese and brussels sprout soufflé was pretty much impossible for a cooking novice to follow. Chatting to Hugh on Facebook this afternoon, I happened to mention that I was quite tempted to have a go at it, just For Science.

Go on then, said Hugh. And tell us how you did it, in a way that anybody could understand.

Now, as I said, I cook, and I do it quite a lot. I’m good at it. Individual cheese soufflés, however, are pretty high on the list of things I wouldn’t normally cook. For a start, they’re very high in fat and salt, and I’m diabetic; I really shouldn’t eat that sort of food. Also, they’re very faffy and fiddly; what I normally call stunt cookery. It gets loads of pans and bowls dirty. And cheese is expensive (rightly so, when it’s good — cheese-making is a skillful process which involves keeping animals, and it has to be stored under the right conditions before it can be sold) and I don’t think making it into a soufflé actually improves it; I’d rather just have the cheese.

But this was a Challenge. And it was For Science. How could I refuse?

If you’re looking for something to show, Twitter, post on your blog, or whatever, to give a taste of Kamikaze Cookery, you might be interested to hear that we’ve just uploaded three of the short motion graphics on the science of food on their own to YouTube.

Enjoy, share freely, and have fun!

Yep, it’s Normal Person vs time again, and this week, we’ve got Gordon Ramsay in the hotseat. Or, as it presumably is in this case, the “hot f—-ing seat”.

This week’s recipe is a bit unusual in that if you think we’ve screwed it up, you can try it yourself! We aquired the recipe from The Times – Gordon Ramsay’s Brussel Sprout and Goat’s Cheese Souffle. I must admit, I’m not sure that I could manage to get it to work myself – I’ll be interested to see what your success levels are if you try it.

I was reading Weight Watchers Magazine yesterday, for reasons I won’t go into. Oh, all right. It was in the pizza shop while I was waiting for my takeaway. Honest. I thought it was quite amusing, because they had a list of “Ten money-saving tips that will also, coincidentally, help you lose weight” and none of them were “stop buying pizza”.

Amidst all the dross there was a quite useful article in there about food expiry dates, what they mean, and how much leeway you can get away with. Surprisingly candid for a magazine article. Basically, it seems to boil down like this:

Sell By Dates are an instruction for the shop, not for you, and can be safely ignored.

Best Before Dates are like the Pirate’s Code; they’re more what ye’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. The clue is in the name: the food will be “best” before that date, but that doesn’t stop you eating it later, although it might taste off if you do. I’ve been experimenting recently in an attempt to recreate shorba fuul sudani, and I had this problem with some lamb mince: tasted a bit weird, but I’m still alive. Then again, lamb mince always tastes weird without mint in it.

The exception to this rule is eggs. The exception is always eggs. About the only thing that I remember from doing my Health & Hygeine certificate, which is now about fifteen years out of date, is that eggs have to be stored very carefully on the bottom shelf of the fridge, because they’re liable to spoil every other item of food in the kitchen just by looking at it. For best results, store eggs in a separate fridge by themselves, or better still, seal them in concrete and dump them in the North Sea. With regard to best-before dates, eggs are so dangerous that they should be thrown out as soon as the date has passed. Salmonellosis is not a pleasant thing to get, so I suspect they have a point. Having said that, I haven’t seen an egg without the Lion Mark for years, so it’s not so much of a problem these days—although the British Egg Information Service asserts that they lion-mark about 85% of UK eggs, so there must still be non-vaccinated eggs out there. Exercise caution.

Use By Dates are the actual instructions which you better re’co’nize. Weight Watchers tantalizingly indicates that these dates are calculated “based on science”, but neglects to mention what science or who does it. Information I’ve picked up elsewhere seems to indicate that the use-by date for most things is set at ten days from production, so I doubt that there can be a lot of science involved. Nonetheless, these are pretty rigid, and it’s best to throw it out if the date has passed.

A lot of places pump an inert gas, like nitrogen, into the packet to exclude the air. This won’t save you. A lot of bacteria multiply anaerobically: botulinum is the key one, and botulism is another one of those things you don’t want to get. This is why you have to be careful when vacuum-sealing for sous-vide, and it applies when someone else has done the sealing, too.

The Weight Watchers article finishes off by saying that for more information, we should look at the Government information site, at www.eatwell.gov.uk. I’ve had a look, and I can’t find anything remotely about expiry dates in there. In typical government-advice fashion, they basically recommend that you throw everything away before you even buy it, just in case they end up liable for something.

We’ve got a treat for you this week: Hugh and a Normal Person—for sufficiently lax values of “normal” (hi Johnnie!)—go mano a mano with that titan of the sleb-chef world, Gordon Ramsay himself. The results should be interesting. Let us know what you think.

So, for once I have a question rather than an answer here on KKCook, and I know we have some Seriously Knowledgable readers.

I’m currently trying to improve my cookery knowledge, and I’m looking for stuff that can seriously improve my skills and my understanding – hardcore French cooking, theory, techniques and skills, and so on.

The only thing is that I really don’t much like books that are just a list of recipes – I don’t get a lot out of them.

So far, I’ve been recommended James Peterson’s Sauces and Shirley O. Corriher’s “Bakewise” and “Cookwise”, and I love (of course) “On Food And Cooking”, “Don’t Sweat The Aubergine”, and just about anything with the words “Heston” and “Blumenthal” on the cover.

So, what Serious Cookbooks would you lot recommend that are more discussions of food, building a meal or a menu, techniques and so on, rather than just pretty picture → recipe with no discussion → pretty picture → recipe?

Still on holiday, so whilst some recent reading tempted me to write an alternate blog post (entitled ‘Joel Robuchon is an ignorant twat’ – read the last[EDIT: that should be last-but-one] question), here’s a probably safer option from the archives.

—-

So this time, we’re testing canned tomatoes – do they really make a difference? Are you as well using ASDA Smart Price tomatoes for everything?

In the cheap-artificial-red corner, we have ASDA SmartPrice Plum Tomatoes, at 19p a can. And in the natural-cherry-red corner, we have Vitale Pomodorini Di Collina, at £1.38 a can from Valvona and Crolla.

I’ll be cooking a simple red tomato sauce with pasta – gently fried onion and garlic with the tomatoes, with a bit of oregano, and finished off with some chopped fresh basil. A very simple dish that leans heavily on the quality of the ingredients.

Phew. First chance to update away from the cooking – it’s pretty hectic. Preparing two sauces at the same time means that they both cook much faster (smaller quantities) and I’ve already slightly burnt the onions in the cherry tomato pan.

Talking of the tomatoes – the differences between the two are obvious from the moment you open the can. The cherry tomatoes have a much richer, thicker sauce, and they themselves are still very well-formed, as opposed to the very thin juice of the ASDA tomatoes. Think Value orange juice compared to Del Monte and you’ll get the idea.

The flavour of the expensive ones raw is very rich, very fruity indeed. But we’ll see how they do once we’ve cooked them.

Finished cooking. The ASDA tomatoes have pretty much dissolved into a sauce, whilst the cherries still hold their texture. Interestingly, the cherry tomato sauce also coats the pasta much better than the ASDA tomatoes.

First tastes, and there’s no comparison. The ASDA tomatoes are quite nice (I’m good at this dish), reasonably salty and interesting, very much a base for the other flavours of the dish. They taste simple and comforting, something to wolf down quick when starving.

The cherry tomatoes hit your mouth, and you go “Jesus, I’d forgotten what a tomato tasted like!”. They’re fruity – something you don’t get out of tinned tomatoes normally. They’re incredibly rich in flavour, they’re clearly the highlight of the dish – using these as a base for another dish would be sacrelige. They made me immediately reach for freshly ground pepper to set the dish off – sure sign of a strong flavour.

On the more thinly coated pieces of pasta you might expect the difference to be less, but it’s actually more. The ASDA sauce barely coats it at all, whilst even on the thinnest-coated cherry pasta, you can taste the smokiness of the overdone onions, the oregano, and even the basil – amazingly the cherry doesn’t overwhelm it.

Overall? Wow. Serious wow.

OK, I’d expected the ASDA tomatoes to get a bit of a kicking, but I wasn’t expecting the cherry tomatoes to be that nice. That’s incredible. You might be able to make a better meal using vine-ripened fresh cherry tomatoes, but I’m not sure of it – you’d not have the rich juice.

The ASDA tomatoes make a good base for other flavours, although they do need thickening a bit. They’re not bad, but they will never make a meal on their own. If you added a few of the Valvona cherry tomatoes to the sauce, it would probably perk up to be pretty damn good.

The cherry tomatoes are astounding. With better-quality pasta and perhaps a couple of free-range poached eggs or a little bit of parma ham (and a cook paying attention to his pan temperature), they don’t just make a nice meal, they make a meal that’s easily restaurant-quality. I have literally never had canned food as good. The meal even felt more filling.

No contest at all – not because the ASDA tomatoes are bad, because they’re not, but because the Valvona tomatoes are astonishing. The only downside is that if you’re planning to cook them with anything, it had better be at a similar quality level or they’ll just outshine it.

No, you idiot, you add the chillis to the stir-fry LAST!

From the department of nearly-having-to-evacuate-my-flat-due-to-aerosolised-chilli-oils

We reported recently that the Royal Society has produced what they call the “perfect” Yorkshire Pudding recipe. As an old Yorkshire boy, I had my doubts. Surely no such recipe is “perfect” unless you were taught it by your grandmother. Nonetheless, in the interests of Science, I gave it a go.

I was pleasantly surprised.

I’m on holiday this week, so we’ve got a slightly shorter and odder episode for you. Enjoy!

Next week: Gordon Ramsey.

I’m on holiday this week, and I badly need to be dealing with angry royalty, if you know what I mean, so here’s one from the archives – my first taste-test of the cheapest versus the most pricey…

—-

So I’ve been curious about how much difference very expensive ingredients make to cooking. Hence, I’m going to try to do a series of taste tests pitting “average” ingredients against the best I can reasonably buy.

The first one: Pasta. In the red corner, famous deli Valvona & Corolla’s La Molisana pasta, price £1.10 for 500g. In the blue corner, Asda/Wal-Mart’s own-brand fusilli, price 34p.

I prepared a very simple dish – pasta al dente, with extra virgin olive oil (the expensive Lidl one) and parmesan (reggiano, again from Lidl).

The differences became obvious pretty much immediately – the ASDA pasta went floppy whilst the V&C was still undercooked. But how would it taste?

The ASDA pasta tastes pretty much like the pasta you’d expect – it just missed al denta, and came out floppy, very smooth-tasting, and turned to paste and disappeared pretty much as soon as you put it in your mouth. Comforting food, but lacking texture in particular, and also any definite taste.

The V&C was definitely nicer. It put up a bit of a fight, for starters, coming apart with a rough floury texture that left you in no doubt very good flour had been used in its creation. It had a definite taste to itself, faint but definitely there, like unleavened bread, and the oil taste worked extremely well with it.

There’s no doubt that for a dish this simple, the V&C pasta is vastly superior- in fact, I’d say it was pretty much essential if you’re going to be doing anything this simple – it adds the extra flavour that’s vital for something this minimal.

However, in any pasta dish with a more definitely flavoured sauce, I’m not so sure. The extra texture of the V&C pasta would definitely enhance the dish, but not as much as other decent ingredients, and the subtle taste that makes the V&C such a winner with olive oil would definitely be lost even under a simple red sauce.

Overall? Buy the V&C, for sure, but keep it for dishes where the pasta and the pasta alone will be the focus of the dish – minimalist lunches like this and perhaps some pasta salads. For everyday eating, whilst it’s nice, other ingredients that are less expensive per dish and have a greater effect on the sauce will provide better value for money.

This whole being-without-an-oven thing, as we call it in the trade, is forcing me to reevaluate my cookery. Normally, I get in from work (late) and stick something ready-made into the cooker. Proper cooking with ingredients is reserved for my days off. There are two main reasons for this: one, it’s late and I’m tired and hungry; and two, cooking properly, with ingredients, is something I actually enjoy doing, so I don’t particularly want to do it when it’s late and I’m tired and hungry.

I have a friend (hi David!) who’s a much better cook than me. It’s a bit embarrassing for both of us. I’m supposed to be the internet-famous cookery show star, and no one’s ever eaten anything I’ve cooked; and he always apologizes every time he produces some fantastic culinary marvel that he suspects might not be entirely perfect. (He’s usually mistaken.). But we both know more-or-less as much as each other about food and what you do with it. So why is he the one who gets to play with quails and fondant tarts, while I can just about stretch to a Sunday roast if you give me a day to do it?

I think the answer is time. I’ve gone off on one already about the Findus Crispy Pancakes generation, but the fact remains that sometimes I want to eat something in order to stave off imminent starvation, without having to go to the effort of putting my creative head on. If I finished work at five and got home by six, with the evening stretching out ahead of me, I might feel differently.

Without an oven, I’m being forced to get creative. (I know there exist microwaveable ready meals, but come on, I have some standards.) For instance, I’ve just reinvented pizza. They all laughed at me when I said I was going to spread toast with tomato puree, then put chicken and cheese on top of it and grill it. (I still have a grill. An oven without a door is a grill.) But I’ll show them, I’ll show them all. And I still have a hob, which means that I’m rediscovering soups.

I’m also making an awful lot of toasted sandwiches. Toasted sandwiches are another way that you can play around with flavours and combinations of ingredients without having to do any real work. I have a sandwich toaster, but I don’t own a health grill, which is a shame, because then I could toast sandwiches and do other stuff as well.

We cover health grills in greater depth, after a fashion, on Wednesday, in the appropriately-named Health Grill Episode. It’s a shorter episode than usual, because it turns out that there’s not a great deal to say about health grills. We hope that we’ve covered all the basics and still managed to be amusing.

In the meantime, does anybody have any other useful tips for coking without an oven?

Those bloody Actual Scientists are getting in on the cooking game, it would seem.

Reader Kris forwards us this piece from UK tech site The Register, in which the Royal Society, one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific institutions in the world, gets into the cooking business with a recipe for the perfect Yorkshire Pudding

Cambridge University chemist and science author John Elmsey wrote the following in response to the Society’s national request for feedback:

“"I have seen many grim results from people who have tried to get their Yorkshires to rise. They frequently made gross errors. After all, cooking is chemistry in the kitchen and one has to have the correct formula, equipment and procedures. To translate the ingredients into chemical terms, these are carbohydrate + H2O + protein + NaCl + lipids.”

Anyone care to try the recipe (in the article above) and tell us what they think?