Rules, Fools and Wise Men: Cooking With Gas

I have a lot of admiration for the contestants on shows like The Great British Bake Off and MasterChef. After all, it can sometimes be stressful cooking for family and friends in the safety of your own kitchen - I always find the getting everything to be ready at the right time and getting it all to the table while it's still hot particularly exacting - but in front of the cameras, in an unfamiliar kitchen with the clock ticking? And then having your food critiqued by experts while the nation watches? No thanks. But there again, I am under no illusions that I am by any means a good enough cook to attempt to enter one of these programmes: I'm certainly not sophisticated enough.

John Torode and Gregg Wallace introduce MasterChef

Like many people, I struggle for inspiration, although I am not yet quite as mired in repetition as my late mother was at one time, when, if for no other reason, you could tell what day of the week it was by what you were having for dinner: "Meatloaf; must be Wednesday." And as in most families, there are certain ingredients that if they are not vetoed completely, are only acceptable if served sparingly or occasionally. But I do enjoy cooking, which surprised me when I first started to do so regularly, which was only about twenty-odd years back. The major reason I started cooking regularly was because I routinely got home from work an hour or so before my wife and it seemed only reasonable for me to at least start the evening meal. Now, I do most of the cooking at home, but there are times when, like my dear old mum, I run out of ideas and fall back on the old standbys, the spag bols and the chillis, the beef casseroles, and the meat, potato and two veg sort of things. When it comes to the spag bols and the chillis, I like to mince my own meat. After the horsemeat scandal of 2013, I stopped buying supermarket mince, and was disappointed with what our local (and well respected) butcher offered, so I bought a mincer.

Recently, however it has not so much been inspiration that I have needed, but rather choosing the type of meal that lends itself to more limited cooking facilities than I have been used to, because in February we had a gas leak. The leak was traced to the hob, which had to be isolated. The National Grid were good enough to leave us a single, electric hob (and a small convector heater, because until we could have the hob isolated, we had no gas supply and consequently no heating) and I am cooking on it still. Why you may ask have I not just replaced the hob? Well, we have some other issues in the kitchen, including the perennial water problems[1] that mean at least some of the plumbing needs fixing. This, by the by, means that the dishwasher is currently hors de combat as using it tends to cause a modest flood, so in the not too distant future we have to bite the bullet and have the whole kitchen remodelled - not something I particularly relish.

At present I have an electric oven (which takes an eternity to heat up and is so underpowered that most things take significantly longer to cook than they should), a microwave, and that single, electric hob. The hob is better than nothing but it proves that for me, gas is superior to electric, simply because it is instantly responsive. And with just one hob, cooking something that would normally need three hobs becomes an interesting exercise in getting a meal prepared that doesn't take three times as long as normal and where everything is still hot when dished up (obviously a hot tray comes in handy). The lack of responsiveness of this otherwise decent little hob also means that I have found that the Delia Smith method of poaching eggs is indispensable (when the pan threatens to boil over, remove from heat and leave it for five minutes or so; the eggs continue to cook in the boiling water and are absolutely perfect).

We have been in a similar position before. When we had a new kitchen fitted at the house we lived in before we moved, we had to have the whole kitchen contents in the lounge temporarily, and had only a microwave to cook with. Frequent trips to local takeaways ensued, which a weekly trip to McDonald's apart, I have fought shy of at the moment.

This time of year, with the weather improving (this week's cold snap excepted) many people's thoughts turn to barbecues, and in fact I have noticed some evidence that some folk have already started cooking al fresco during the few really quite warm days we had recently, but although the barbie is immensely popular, I'm afraid I can think of little that is worse. I have never been a fan of eating outdoors. The memories of roadside 'picnics' on trips out with my parents and aunt and uncle (he did the driving, we didn't have a car), consisting largely of cheese, cucumber and salad cream sandwiches, come flooding back when anyone suggests eating outdoors. One sees it less these days, but there seemed to once be a time when in the summer, virtually every lay-by was occupied by at least one car-load of people unwrapping sandwiches and pouring tea from Thermos flasks. Personally I have never found that my dining experience is enhanced by having to fend off seagulls and pigeons or swatting away wasps and flies, nor is it improved by trying to eat from a paper plate while balancing a drink in the other hand, or while perched precariously on a fold-up chair that threatens to tip the occupant onto the grass at the slightest ill-advised movement.

Expectation...

If eating outdoors is bad enough, then cooking outside is even worse: I have never understood the attraction of slaving over what is basically a fire, charring burgers and sausages to an even blackness on the outside while maintaining a state of rawness on the inside, potentially poisoning oneself and anyone else ill-advised enough to actually eat anything you have cooked. I suppose it is possible I might have a different view if I had ever used a proper barbecue as cooking in the garden chez Woods has only ever been done using disposable barbecues, on which subject, a word of advice. If you are going to ignore the instruction that says "Remove this card before lighting," make sure you have an ample supply of water at hand. I realise that these views will be anathema to the two-thirds of the nation who own barbecues and get through 40,000 tonnes of barbecue charcoal every year, but it is probably no coincidence that cases of food poisoning in the UK almost double over the summer months - you have been warned.