Brundlesoup

A fly got into the microwave with my cup of soup. Time for a rant...

I really hate cooking. Any food should not, I think, take longer to prepare than it takes to eat. A wise man once said, “Cooking is a science, not an Art.” (In other words, if the cook gets a recipe correct once, s/he ought to be able to get it right every time.) Forget about pretentious presentations of dinners or suppers. Just put something that looks and smells (not the offensive stink of curry, please) reasonably edible on a plate. Eat only when you’re hungry and the appearance of food becomes irrelevant. Pasta is the exception, in that it appears to be a foodstuff but isn’t. (It’s just wallpaper glue.) How did the media fall into the evil-death-trap of worshipping cooks? Why is daytime TV plagued with typically obnoxious ‘characters’ telling us how to serve ‘dishes’?

Everybody’s heard of Fanny Craddock. Delia Smith made her fortune with bestseller cookbooks. Neither was glamorous or had soulless telly shows. Now, though, we have the supposedly divine Nigella Lawson. TV chefs are the worst, however… There’s the gormlessly camp Ainsley Harriott, the drunken trendy Keith Floyd (deservedly lampooned by impressionist Rory Bremner), old crusty Rick Stein, and the loathsome Gordon (“women can’t cook”) Ramsey, who seems to believe he’s like Steven Seagal’s Casey Ryback in the kitchen. The latest gimmicky brigade of kitchen boys (Jamie Oliver, Gary Rhodes, etc) seem intent on proving that celebrity chefs don’t actually need anything resembling a genuine personality for TV success. Writer and novelist Steve Aylett is known for, among other things, delivering the mighty wallop of satire to famous chefs.

Why waste hours chopping, dicing, boiling and roasting? Ping! That’s my five-minute wait for a chicken snack...