Britons are scared stiff of making a souffle according to a recent survey

Nov 20 2008 by Paul Fulford, Birmingham Mail

JAMIE wants you to Pass It On, Gordon wants you to Cookalong, Delia wants you to cheat and Nigella just wants you to enjoy every sinful mouthful.

While we go mad for various cookbooks and TV food shows, our supermarkets are still full of pre-prepared vegetables and ready meals in plastic cartons. It’s completely possible to ‘cook’ dinner for six without so much as breaking an egg or chopping an onion.

A recent survey found that the majority of Britons (74 per cent) are most likely to cook up spaghetti bolognese over any other dish - not surprisingly, we’re scared stiff at the thought of making a souffle.

While the Welsh are apparently the most scared of going into the kitchen and Londoners get spooked at the thought of making Yorkshire pud, braveheart Scots are fearless in the face of fridges and cookers. (You’d expect nothing less from a nation of haggis-lovers!)

Eating factory-prepared food is all very well, if you don’t mind the taste of mysterious additives or the soul-less ‘ping’ of the microwave to announce that it’s ready, but there’s no denying that pulling something out of a packet destroys any of the romance attached to eating - or cooking.

It’s time to reconnect with your kitchen - you know, the room with the fridge and the kettle in it - and get to grips with cooking.

We sent four writers off to the frontline to test the latest and greatest in cooking technology.

n IDEAL FOR: Beginners looking to expand their repertoires. Packed with 500 pages of tempting and easy-to-follow recipes, as well as food preparation advice, shopping tips and a DVD.

n EASE OF USE: Ironically, the most innovative element of this package, the DVD, is the least useful.

Instead of demonstrating recipes from the book, the DVD includes a rather eclectic selection of cooking techniques.

Perhaps more advanced chefs might find demonstrations on how to trim and decorate pastry, whisk egg whites, cut carrot batonnets, butterfly a leg of lamb and scale and trim a fish, useful. But this particular novice was hoping for a demo on how to make ‘Chicken with Pancetta’. Or just a pasta sauce.

Having discarded the DVD - although I did pick up a few tips on how to poach an egg - I turned to the cookery book.

n VERDICT: Packed with great recipes! My partner was thoroughly impressed by a chicken dish with olives and capers plus a lentil side dish, that I whipped up with relatively little effort.

To make life even easier, the book also contains a mini-recipe shopping guide which you can pop in your handbag. Or if you can’t find the motivation to go outdoors, the recipes have also been thoughtfully integrated into the ocado food shopping website (www.ocado.com). Well, it is getting a bit chilly...

(Tested by Sarah O’Meara)

n IDEAL FOR: Technology whizz kids who prefer consoles to cookers. The Cooking Guide has 250 recipes to choose from all over the world, depending on your skill level, available ingredients and time to prepare. The Nintendo DS is a handheld games console with a touch screen, so simply click and point your way around the numerous menus until you find a recipe you want to cook.

n EASE OF USE: Straightforward, with great results. If you don’t already own a Nintendo DS, however, Cooking Guide becomes an expensive option - the consoles cost around £100. But this handy pocket-sized tool is a worthwhile investment, especially if you have a cluttered kitchen or are an untidy cook and space is at a premium.

n VERDICT: Excellent. Being able to choose recipes based on available ingredients ensures you can still eat interesting food, even if the fridge is looking slightly bare. And with plenty of dishes from all over the world, chances are you won’t have tried some of the recipes before, let alone cooked them yourself. The step-by-step guides are simple and even read out loud, so you don’t have to keep looking down at a cookbook.

(Tested by Andrew Welch)

n IDEAL FOR: Novice cooks with ideas of grandeur. Follow this step-by-step guide to cooking tasty Japanese food at home. Includes a free CD of Japanese music to put you in the oriental mood.

n EASE OF USE: The ring-bound volume enables you to flip easily between Part I, which covers essential Japanese ingredients, techniques and equipment, and Part II, which has all the recipes. I spent two years in Japan, so I had a basic grasp of the main ingredients already, but the book introduces them very simply to newcomers. But you will need to do some preparation as it’s unlikely you’ll have a tub of miso paste or dashi (dried fish used for stock) lurking in the back of your larder.

n VERDICT: I cooked a three-course meal starting with squash miso soup, with tofu and mangetout, then seared bonito (tuna) sashimi and beef steak with sesame miso sauce. My partner is new to Japanese food and was impressed by the mix of bold flavours, such as the ginger, soya sauce and lime dressing for the tuna on a bed of daikon (radish). The miso could easily have overpowered the flavours of the butternut squash and the sesame, but it complemented them really well and despite the frying, the dishes tasted light and healthy.

(Tested by Kate Whiting)

n IDEAL FOR: Those who ‘can’t cook, won’t cook... no, really won’t cook’. In a nation where we find it far easier to recommend a great ready-meal rather than a recipe, Jamie Oliver has decided to pick up where his school dinners makeover left off and transform the nation into master chefs. The book accompanies Jamie’s TV show of the same name, where Rotherham residents are encouraged to learn a recipe and pass it on in the community.

n EASE OF USE: Even the most basic of cooks will find these recipes easy to follow. The book is also a great tool for encouraging friends to talk about cooking and inciting passionate debate about the best way to chop an onion - we ended up discussing three different ways to do it!

n VERDICT: While coordinating communal dinner parties isn’t easy, sharing tribulations and triumphs in the kitchen is fun. But be warned: you probably won’t find the same level of co-operation when it comes to washing-up.