Alex, you write that 6 meals a day is recommended, while I sure don't see anything thats really wrong with that, it's really tideous to eat something so often.

Yeah, it might be, but reducing it to four meals works, too. The real problem is when people only have two meals a day (more common than what you think) and cram down loads of carbs and fat their body cannot use straight away. They'll pack up like bears, and it ain't gonna be muscle. A guy on my dorm is eating about two times a day and it's all freezer food from the supermarkets. I don't think I need to tell he's big as a house.

Someone asked, so here's an ideal day of mine in terms of meals:

Breakfast: I wake up and feel so hungry I could eat the alarm clock. For breakfast I have soured milk, muesli, dark bread with chicken, water and a teaspoon of creatine. A fruit if there's anything nearby.

Snack: After about 2 hours I need something lighter, most commonly a pasta salad with chicken or salmon, or a ciabatta.

Dinner: After another 2-3 hours I have dinner. This could be anything, but I like something heavy with fish or meat. Even tuna salads work, if you increase the portion.

Depending on the time, I will either add a smaller dinner portion again before work out, or go straight to the gym 1-2 hours after dinner.

Post-work out: Gainer, which is the equivalent of a large meal. I also drink about 1 litre of water during work out. When I get home, I usually drink a half litre of oat milk for fast carbs and D-vitamin.

Evening dinner: This time I pack up a lot of food, increasing the portion of carbs. Fish or meat.

Pre-night snacks: If I have nuts around, I eat of that, otherwise I actually often have a second breakfast, focusing on eating those slow carbs that last over night.

This is a good day for me, sometimes I don't have time to eat post-breakfast snacks, although I really should. Ideally I would increase the protein load, but because of economic reasons (I currently spend twice as much money on food than what I do on rent), I've chosen to improvise. Put this in comparison to all the meat and milk Martin consumes in a week, and you realize how your whole physique changes once you begin lifting weights and kicking ass almost every day of the week.

I have previously reviewed Heinz's less than satisfactory Chinese Chicken and Sweetcorn soup. I'm pleased to say that their Farmer Market Soup might be better.

To be honest I'm not really sure how good the soup is. The circumstances of this meal were radically different to the Chinese soup. Instead of being in the kitchen with a fully functioning cooker, I was inebriated in a field next to my tent and compromised with a very meek portable gas cooker. There were several others with me.

We'd stumbled in from drinking all night long, and decided we weren't tired yet. Initially we made amused ourselves by setting fire to a quick collection of dry material. Although at first quite a spectacle it went out in mere seconds, and only with hindsight would we come to regret burning all of our toilet paper. Then we tried cooking beer cans, but after we had scolded ourselves with enough simmering alcohol, we found the tin of soup on the floor and decided upon its nourishment.

As avid readers of my blog know, I have successfully prepared ready-made soup before. Using this experience and know-how, I managed to open the can using the ring-pull, and suggested heating it somehow to the others. We found the mild-mannered gas cooker, turned it on, and placed the tin on top.

Due to my expertise I was in charge of stirring the contents of the can every so often and checking its temperature. The flame wasn't very vigorous, so for about 45 minutes we talked about ways one could consume or otherwise use their own faeces in a survival situation. For example: coiling a turd around a mug of tea to keep it warm, or leaving several turds outside of your tent to keep the cannibals away. I think there were around several dozen practical suggestions in all.

The results

We found a fork trodden into the floor and used that, combined with sipping from the tin. All I remember of the soup is that it wasn't overtly bad and the potato chunks were of a good size. The ritual of cooking, sharing and partaking was greatly appreciated by all of us. My personal advice would be to read someone else's blog if you want decent cooking advice.

Before I begin this product review, I would like to announce that I cannot cook, being as I am a complete culinary philistine. I can make satisfactory scrambled eggs, but that is about it. Yes, a transvestite that cannot cook, so sue me! In no circumstances should the following article be read at all.

I came across "Soups of the World: Chinese Chicken and Sweetcorn” from Heinz today. They are mostly known for their baked beans and tomato sauce, both of which I will heartily endorse. With this seal of quality, I felt confident as I decided on preparing the tin of soup.

I admit that I am no chef, have no aspirations of becoming a chef, and also I’m really not that big a fan of eating at all, generally consuming the minimum required amount. But when it comes to Chinese food I may be considered an authority, having eaten it all over Europe. In the future I hope to travel to China and open my own Chinese takeaway there. I just hope they like cross-dressers!

The tin’s label looks authentic enough, as you can see. A setting sun behind a couple of giant banzai trees, and what seems like an oriental multi-storey car park. The picture of the soup in a bowl also tells me to put the soup in a bowl when I’m done.

So let’s get cracking with the cooking! Here are the directions:

Empty into hob, heat until hot (not until boiling) whilst stirring.

I had some trouble with this initially, as “hot” is rather vague and I haven’t had much stirring practice. I did manage to empty the tin out by myself, thanks to the convenient ring-pull on the top. The microwave instructions were much more precise and I am sure they would have yielded better results.

A few minutes later and I had my soup ready!

The results

Unfortunately it does not compare well to what you can get in the buckets at a professional Chinese buffet. Far too savoury and overpowering, the soup also lacks the kind of sticky texture that I normally enjoy when swallowing fluids.

Chicken and sweetcorn soup should be a sweet, easy going stroll, ideally intended as an introduction to a meal. This recipe was not delicate enough, and the after taste was not at all desirable as I burped unwillingly for the next few hours.

Overall - not recommended. For the authentic Chinese experience, try Bachelors Super Noodles instead, or if you can afford it, visit your local Chinese takeaway!

As Westerners keep getting richer and fatter, some people are getting worried and want governments to intervene in order to reduce their ability to buy certain kinds of food. John Hawks summarizes their thinking:

Ooohh, those evil corporations. Making food taste good so that we want more of it! Those FIENDS! Why can't they make bad food so that we'll want less?

This kind of mentality leads to nothing good, as Don Boudreaux points out using the example of television instead of food:

Mr. Hill's attitude is the seed of totalitarianism: unable to distinguish what he does voluntarily from what he is coerced into doing, he wants to use force to save himself from the annoyance of fleetingly encountering disagreeable ideas as he flips his channel changer - and to use force to hamper other persons' access to those ideas.

Now, I can afford to laugh at all this because with my fast metabolism, high physical activity level and taste for meat it takes me an enormous amount of effort to gain any fat. Perhaps evolution will weed out the unsexy lardasses. The future may well belong to my descendants who are easily able to remain lean and healthy in an age of plenty. For at least the near future, though, other people do have a problem. It's not a problem government's going to solve, though. Can government make people "eat bad food so they'll want less"? George Orwell wrote about the uselessness of this in The Road To Wigan Pier:

The miner’s family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

Sounds pretty damn hopeless. You're not the government, though, so you can do something. Become a better cook and make some food for your relatives or friends once in a while. Even if you can't really compete with McDonald's it will make a positive difference, especially if you inspire someone to imitate your ways. Cooking may have made us human once before, after all.

Here's a specific example: Texan grilling methods are vastly superior to those popular in Eastern Europe, perhaps because we just haven't had grills long enough and few know what they're doing. If you lived in Texas long enough that you can make a proper barbecue sauce and know how to use it, you will not only gain popularity but you will also teach people something. Even if they don't actually ask you for advice, just seeing you baste meat will be a valuable learning experience for someone you know. Sure, they may still eat fast food burgers more often than they grill their own, but they'll fire up the grill a little more often once they know how to make their burgers consistently juicy. That makes the world a slightly better place.

Professor Don Boudreaux is no fan of politicians, and he thinks that people take too much of an interest in Barry Half-White's food choices.

Maureen Dowd wants President Obama to display his healthy, low-fat eating habits more publicly ("Hold the Fries," June 17). The idea is that Our Leader's ostentatious display of his preferred diet will inspire ordinary Americans to eat better.

What has become of Americans? How different are we now from Louis XIV's French subjects who gazed in awe upon him at his table? And are we so childish that our dietary choices are directed by political celebrities?

I don't know about that... I'm generally in support being a good example to others and influencing them to eat better and cook better. Even when someone very powerful does it and even though I would starve if I followed his advice, it's all right. If our elected leaders must lead, I'd rather they lead by example than by decree.

Someone had recently complained to me about not having any choices worth supporting in an election. I told her to just not vote and do whatever she would do if there was no election - maybe cook something. Unlike voting in an election, cooking a meal is a positive step towards a better world.

Ever wondered what really made us human? Most evolutionary anthropologists will point to the social culture of hunter-gatherers and eventually the advent of agricultural domestication. Richard Wrangham proposes an entirely different perspective: thanks to the discovery of cooking, we saved time otherwise spent on hunting, gathering and chewing raw food and spent on other, intellectually challenging activities, instead. This gradually increased our cognitive abilities until we began organizing social culture around cooking. And so human culture was founded.

Apparently, the idea that cooking was the crucial difference between their diet and ours came to Wrangham as he stared into the fire at home. Though there's no archaeological evidence of controlled fire before 800,000 years ago, he realized that a cluster of changes in the human face, brain, and gut 1.8 million years ago could be explained by only one thing—regular cooked meals. His argument begins with the odd spend-money-to-make-money aspect of digestion: You must burn calories in order to release calories from food (a fact deeply cherished by celery-chewing teenage girls). Because raw food is harder to digest, it takes more calories to get the calories out of it, and you get fewer calories from it anyway.

Wrangham illustrates this with an array of observations and experimental evidence. He cites a BBC TV show about an "Evo Diet Experiment" that followed nine volunteers who gave up processed food for 12 days and ate only the kinds of food that humans are supposedly wired to eat, mostly raw nuts, fruits, and vegetables. At the end of the experiment, the volunteers had improved cholesterol and blood pressure, and they also lost a lot of weight, despite the fact that the food was chosen to give them the required amount of calories per day. Wrangham even meets with some modern-day raw foodists, who are all very slim. He finds ample evidence that people who eat mostly raw food "thrive only in rich modern environments," and they usually feel very, very hungry. An actual "evo" diet, Wrangham notes, would deliver even fewer calories; require some actual hunting and gathering; and, being more like the diet of chimps, need to be chewed for hours and hours every day.

Cooked food, by contrast, is easier to digest, gives you more energy, and takes no time to eat. Cooking also kills bacteria and renders many natural poisons inactive. So the simple expedient of heating food gave us access to many more safe calories every day, which was a survival jackpot. Once we started to eat soft, cooked food, our jaws and teeth were no longer required to munch ceaselessly, and they became smaller and more delicate. That is why we don't look like apes anymore. Similarly, the more cooked food we ate, the less industrial-strength digestion we had to do, and the smaller our guts became. In the same way that our bodies evolved to better walk on two legs, our bellies changed to better handle well-done over rare. This had two enormous payoffs. First, as our guts got smaller, this freed up energy for our brains to operate on a larger and larger scale. (Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler first discovered the relationship between gut size and brain size, dubbing it the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis.) Second, as we spent less time eating, we had more time to do other things with those rapidly expanding brains.

The real issue here is of course the cause-effect dilemma; Wrangham needs to find solid evidence that we began cooking much earlier on in human history than previously believed. The fact that we are hardwired to mostly survive on a paleo-diet is already known and doesn't necessarily support his thesis. So what can we possibly learn from his theory?

Cooking food has obviously saved us time, and still does. Yet, depending on how you prepare your food, there are both costs and benefits. Ordering home pizza might save you time compared to, say, preparing a chicken salad, but you will also spend more money on eating less healthy food. Today we lead busy lives, but I doubt the activities with which we replace cooking time amount to serious cognitive development. In fact, we're rapidly losing knowledge of how to clean fish, how to prepare meat, how to make salads etc. We're losing thousands of years of practical cultural wisdom.

Therefore I propose a cooking revolution, which suggests we need to spend more time in the kitchen, and preferably make it a social activity again like in ancient times. I know I'm not alone. Why not celebrate both the ancient art of cooking and the recent advent of beer by preparing this tasty-looking beer can chicken recipe by Wendy Cooper?

Visiting the supermarket today, I spotted extra cheap meat on sale. Nice. You can stuff several kilos of meat in the freezer and then have that ready within minutes after an intensive work out. The problem? Of course, all of it was pre-seasoned, which means they've spiced it with all kinds of crap that will make the meat dry and taste bland. Not belonging to the group of mildly handicapped people who don't know how to create their own marinade, I prefer to prepare the meat myself. With no other option than to buy expensive alternatives, I grabbed the package and proceeded to the counter. After all, you can always remove most of their BBQ crap before frying it.

This should be no uncommon situation for any of us. The jams in the stores nowadays consist of 55 % sugar and 45 % berries. Meat stocks include strange substances. They even manage to screw up stuff like bread by adding artificial additives to make it look more appealing. Consumers blame supermarkets and political leadership – in other words, it's society's fault. I've got news for you: this ain't the fault of the supermarkets or even the politicians. It's crowdism.

"The public sucks, fuck hope!" - George Carlin

Consumers beg for these nasty products because they want food to last a life-time. Take jam for instance. Why do all jams taste so sweet, besides making kids happy? Because if they reduced the amount of sugar to a sensible amount, it wouldn't last many months in the fridge. My question: Why the hell would you want a can of jam to last for a year? You buy it, you use it, and you eat it up in at least one or two weeks. To expect all products to last forever is insanity.

Now, some stuff can naturally last for months, like cooking wine. Fine. But too much sugar, salt and additives destroy the natural product. Not only does the food lose its taste, but it also includes strange substances that most likely aren't very good for us. Consumers complain about these things, but at the same time they expect food to look great and last forever. Would people buy bread if it didn't include additives to make it look tasty? Probably not, because they have no idea what real home-baked bread looks like. They've only seen the industrially fabricated mess that lines the shelves at the supermarket.

Stop complaining about supermarkets and political leaders. Yeah, they're fools, but the real morons here are the public. Carlin was right. As long as societal leadership caters to the public, we will dumb things down forever until we're eating sugar-coated nuclear waste. The average consumer is an idiot, because he’s looking for the perfect product: cheap, easy to prepare, long-lasting, and visually appealing. What will the trade-offs be? No one cares, because they're too busy cramming industrial waste into their microwaves after work. It's about time someone said it: the supermarkets ain't the problem, it’s the public.

As we already know, fast food is too damn slow, tastes bland, and is not very economic in the long run. Still, you're out of time, maybe you're working out, and need tasty, simple food ready in the fridge when you come home after work or training. Chill, because there are home cooked alternatives that beat any fast food junk sold today. The Domestic Diva offers a tasty-looking chicken curry salad recipe.

While I'm tempted to try this out, for those who really suffer from a shortage of time, cooking the chicken breasts might add too much time to your schedule. A good way of solving this problem is to do like Martin and save your time-consuming cooking for weekends, then store all of it in the freezer (don't worry about keeping the chicken in the fridge, but rice is very sensitive to being stored and it’s not recommended for more than a few days). Alternatively, my own chicken salad is slightly simpler to prepare because it doesn't require you to cook the chicken (this is where convenience pays off):

1 barbecued chicken (most stores sell these at good prices, ready to take home)
2 paprika (red and green for diversity effect)
1 can of corn; ~300 grams (people who don't trust corn can avoid and replace with cashew nuts or tinned mushrooms instead)
1 small leek
1 package of cherry tomatoes or 2 whole regular tomatoes
1 cucumber
1 lettuce (iceberg lettuce works fine)
~3 dl (not yet boiled) macaroni (elite body builders may wish to skip the pasta altogether)
1-2 red chili peppers
olive oil
vinegar

And for the dressing:

crème fraîche (sour cream)
chili sauce
thyme

While boiling the macaroni, pour some olive oil in a very large bowl and then add vinegar of your choice. Mix with a spoon. Using your hands or a pair of scissors, extract all the meat and (optionally) skin from the chicken and place it in a smaller bowl. If you haven't done this before, you will notice how easy this really is (hint: start by separating wings from the chicken and then work with the breast area). Then chop and mix all remaining ingredients in the large bowl. The salad is probably going to taste slightly less spicy if you decide to mix the chili into the sauce instead.

When the macaroni are done boiling, rinse them with cold water in a colander and then mix them with the chicken. You now only need a third bowl to mix the sauce in, where you can also add some chili (powder) if you like. This is basically it. Some may want to boil a few eggs and add to the salad as well. Serve from both salad bowls to mix chicken and macaroni with the rest of the ingredients--at least this is the way I do it, because chances are small you're ever going to find a bowl big enough to hold all of these ingredients, unless you cut back on the proportions.

This will be food for many days. People like me who work out almost every day of the week will probably consume more. This is where chicken salad and its infinite variants are useful: you spend a little over an hour to make food for several days ahead and store it in the fridge, where it will gather taste. You can change ingredients in both salad and sauce to vary the dish, and you don't have to microwave anything. If you don't have access to cheap BBQ chicken, why not use cold turkey or ham instead? Screw greasy fast food. Life of the independent fitness and cooking master has never been as easy and efficient as it is today.

Crowdism exists everywhere, even in kitchen households. When people are shopping for kitchen equipment - scoops, saucepans and spoons - they tend to buy whatever carries the cheapest price tag. A big mistake the crowd always falls for, because it thinks in oversimplified terms (cheap = good, expensive = bad).

Watch what happens when those plastic tools have been used for a few months, or even weeks. They break, melt, and bend. Very few plastic tools in the kitchen last for long, unless they're hardened in special ways, and most of them aren't. Smart people of course realize this when shopping and therefore choose more expensive equipment out of metal. They pay more up front, but ultimately save money since metal equipment often lasts a lifetime. The saucepans my grandmother bought in in the 50's are still like new, and she uses them practically every day. That is quality.

I learned this lesson all over again just today, when boiling fish sauce with my small saucepan (2 litres). Of course, when I was about to pour the sauce over to a bowl, the plastic handle suddenly broke in half (!), spilling sauce all over the stove. Apparently, there was no metal inside that handle, so it couldn't resist the heat. To my credit, that saucepan was a present from someone, so I wasn't responsible for the decision of buying it, but it added another hour to cleaning up the kitchen today. Avoid plastic kitchen tools - go for quality stuff that lasts a life-time.

I eat a lot and I've had to become pretty damn efficient at feeding myself because I also play in four bands and lift weights on top of a full-time job. That leaves me little sympathy for people who eat takeout or fast food regularly because they think they don't have the time. This really hit me after playing Monday's gig - the band was supposed to get some free food from the bar but there wasn't time to eat before the first set or during the break. Afterwards I asked how long it would take to get some meat and potatoes, and when told that it was 20 minutes decided it'd be faster if I just packed up, went home, ate something there and went to bed.

Cooking your own food has many benefits, but efficiency is an underrated one. Don't get me wrong, it's great to cook something stupidly inefficient regularly - this evening I'm planning to spend three hours stirring a wok full of chili made with proper Texan chili powder. But sometimes you do need to eat something without much work, and you can make those meals much quicker than getting a kebab or a burger. Though I am an extreme case, people with more normal caloric needs and saner schedules can apply many of the same principles as well, just without reaching the same extremes.

Some of this stuff is ridiculously simple. I always make sure I have a few cans of fish (mostly tuna in water and herring in various sauces) for when I'm in a real rush even though I only end up eating one or two a week. I also always keep some pickled vegetables, a piece of cheese, and a few liters of milk around as well. With those things I can eat a very quick meal with no cooking involved at all, or just down a half liter of milk in a few seconds on my way out the door. I also always keep some mixed frozen vegetables, shellfish and/or ground beef in the freezer - they can be cooked very quickly though of course you have to thaw them first, so hopefully you'll know you need to cook them quickly a day in advance.

On weekends I also roast large amounts of meat - for example a two-kilo piece of boneless beef and one and a half kilos of chicken breasts. That lets me basically leave something in the oven for a few hours, take it out, and then have enough for several meals. I can either reheat pieces of it with various sauces and vegetables or just eat them cold. I always make sure it's something I can serve in different ways - if you make a huge pot of oxtail stew which can really be only eaten one way (at best with different garnishes) you'll be really tired of it long before you've managed to finish even the first tail. I know few people eat that much meat, but having a big chunk of roasted cow in the fridge is extremely convenient. The key is planning roughly what you're going to eat a few days in advance.

It would take me a few minutes to bike to the nearest McDonald's, then a few more to wait for the burger. I suppose I could make the time for that and those burgers are tasty, but they're not quite tasty enough to make up for how time-consuming and inconvenient fast food is.

The supermarket was offering some good deals on quality meat last week, so I took the opportunity to buy a few kilos and stock up the freezer. In the summertime, you want a good potato salad to go with your barbecued meat. Most people I know, including friends, buy potato salad from the store, but they're nuts. The industrially produced potato salad is 70% sauce and only 30% potatoes, includes strange substances, and is almost always too strong/bitter in taste. When making your own salad, you can balance out the flavors much better, and you will be able to make it less fattening.

There are tons of recipes out there, such as this one by Wendy Cooper, which interestingly is very close to my own:

1 lb - Baby potatoes, quartered
1/4 cup – Water
1/2 tsp - Montreal steak spice
2 tbsp – Balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp – Olive (or canola) oil
2 tsp - Dijon mustard
1/4 tsp – Salt
1/4 tsp – Pepper
4 cups – Spring mix lettuce, lightly packed
1/2 lb – Cooked medium shrimp that have been peeled and deveined)
1/2 cup - Thinly sliced red pepper

Put potato and water into medium microwave safe bow. Microwave covered, on high for about 10 minutes, stirring every three minutes, until tender. Rinse with cold water. Drain. Add steak spice. Toss.

Meanwhile, combine next 5 ingredients in large bowl. Makes about 1/3 cup of dressing.

Add remaining 3 ingredients and potato. Toss. Makes about 8 cups.

As you can see, her recipe is based on the French variant, but she also includes shrimp. It looks really tasty, but when it comes to cooking, each to his own. Here is my own grand potato salad recipe, based upon a few years of experimentation with various recipes from my mother:

For 4-5 people, depending on how much they eat:

1. 8-10 potatoes of yellow, hard sort (white, mealy sorts will squash too easily)
2. 2 tablespoons - white wine vinegar of ecological sort (trust me on the ecological--it carries an entirely different taste)
3. 4-5 tablespoons - olive oil
4. 1 small leek, chopped
5. 1 handful of chives, or about 1 dl, chopped
6. 1-2 dl - chopped pickled gherkin
7. 3 dl - créme fraiche or sour cream
8. 1-2 tablespoons - custard (Dijon offers a stronger taste, but choosing a sweeter sort probably works better)
9. salt, pepper

Boil the potatoes, then split in quarters when they're cold. Don't start splitting them while they're hot, as they tend to squash that way. If you can't wait, place them in (ice) cold water for 10-15 min. Mix the other ingredients into a nice sauce, and then mix down the potatoes at last. Then comes the secret behind a really tasty potato salad: place in the fridge for at least 24 hours. This is where even the professionals fail. You need to let the flavors grow by placing the salad in the cold for a longer period of time, or else the salad will taste bland. Not bad if you serve it right away, but it's not recommended.

I admit, I'm a sucker for potato salad, but it's appreciated by almost everyone, is fairly easy and cheap to make, and works with both meat and fish--hell, some people put it on their morning sandwich when they're out of cheese. Let's see if anyone of you guys and girls out there can arrange a decent BBQ party with this winning recipe. Post comments on how the party went.

As all of you should be aware of by now, I'm an ardent supporter of cooking your own food. Like environmentalism, cooking something I think is super-obviously important. One of my main arguments is that home cooking is cheaper than fast food. Jennifer Reese over at Slate investigates whether this is true:

Although I love to cook, I've always secretly, darkly, suspected it is costlier to craft at home what you can buy at Ralph's. Obviously, homemade bread tastes better than Wonder, but does playing Martha Stewart really save you money? While packaged food is mostly lousy, some of it can be spectacularly inexpensive. Out of work and increasingly obsessed with our grocery budget, I decided to test my intuition and run a cost-benefit analysis on how much I'd save—if anything—by making from scratch six everyday foods that I usually purchase from Safeway and my local bakery.

Except where noted, I chose the most affordable products and ingredients available (i.e., the 10-pound sack of generic sugar instead of a tiny pouch of organic cane sugar from Whole Foods) and priced everything down to the last grain of salt. Based on an estimate from my utility company, it costs around 32 cents per hour to run an electric oven. To melt butter slowly over a gas burner: 9 cents per hour. To boil water, more like 14 cents per hour. I take it as a given that everyone knows better than to quit their job—any job—to take up cracker-baking, so I attached no value to time. I happen to love messing around in the kitchen.

Her findings are in summary (make or buy):

Bagels: Make.
Cream Cheese: Buy.
Yogurt: Make.
Jam: Make.
Crackers: Buy.
Granola: Make.

And her conclusion, moderately supporting my cooking revolution:

The experiment wasn't a complete victory for the home cook, but it came remarkably close. Stupid cream cheese. That a human being can generally produce tastier food than a factory is hardly surprising, but while I desperately hoped it would be cheaper to cook at home, I was shocked when, in many cases, it actually was. It's one thing to eat runny yogurt and flaccid bagels because they're a bargain; it's another entirely to pay for the privilege. My verdict: If you've been eyeing some intimidating culinary project—mozzarella, marshmallows, vanilla?—give it a try. It might be fun, it might be delicious, and it might very well save you some money.

Notice the pattern of her findings: the food most easily produced in industry compared to in the kitchen is also what you want to buy, because it will naturally cost less. The surprising part of her study is that even really tedious kitchen work like producing jam (most people barely bother sterilizing glass bottles these days) seems to be worth the sweat and pain--if cheap organic fruit is available. This is why living close to local markets beats having to visit expensive specialty stores in supermarkets.

What I find positive about Reese's work: home cooking is actually worth it if you want to save money and make better-tasting food. And who could argue against that? You guessed it: laziness, lack of knowledge, fear of failure, lack of time. All of these things are factors for many of us, but also serve as easy excuses for not taking control of our own lives. As home chefs, we serve our family, not the industry. A cooking culture is something passed on from generation to generation. Every serious Conservative man and woman should work to secure his or her own national cooking culture, and it's at home where it all begins.

Anyone who is home cooking daily knows that if you want to succeed in the kitchen, you need to have the right ingredients stored before you begin. Some can be bought the same day or a few days before we plan to make the dish, but there are a few general specialties I recommend you always keep at home (except obvious stuff like salt and pepper), whatever you're cooking. Take notes:

Red chili

I enjoy spicy food, and therefore I always keep red chili at home. It's a perfect way of giving a large variety of dishes some character: Bolognese sauce, meat stew, chicken salad - you name it. All you have to do is finely chop one fairly large red chili, and pour it into whatever you're cooking. The seeds are the real spice-carriers. Some people, who don't like Mexican food etc., worry about chili being too strong. Not true, unless you select something bold like a Spanish red pepper; Chopped chili in a boiling stew, for instance, will certainly not make the dish very hot, since it will become diluted by the other ingredients. In fact, the only time a chili will taste hot for real is when you serve it raw, for instance in a salad.

Cooking wine (red and white)

We often overlook wine when cooking, because we feel it's generally too expensive to buy a whole bottle, only use a quarter of it in a boiling stew, and then have to drink it all up in a few days before it gets old in the fridge. This is why they invented cooking wine, which is basically as close to real wine as you can come, only there is virtually no alcohol included. This means the product is a lot cheaper than if you'd buy some cheap sort in the wine stores. Most of the alcohol will evaporate anyway, plus, an opened bottle of cooking wine will last for several months in the fridge. Practical, cheap, and will spice up your Italian Bolognese sauce, leaving your friends wondering what you've been up to. Use red wine for anything with meat, and white wine with fish.

Olive oil

There are several reasons why you want to have olive oil at home, but I'll just mention two of them: (1) it's great to fry with, because it won't give the ingredients that fatty taste you get from margarine, and it usually never squirts outside the kettle (be aware: as opposed to margarine, which melts when hot, olive oil will not change in appearance when hot, so watch your frying pan/kettle at all times), and (2) it's perfect for making your own homemade salad dressing. Forget the strange stuff they sell at the supermarkets - this is easier than a walk in the park: 3 parts of olive oil, 1 part (white wine) vinegar, salt, pepper – done! For a complete but simple BBQ salad: add one chopped onion and a few tomatoes, preferably cherry tomatoes (split in half). The barbecue party is saved.

Chili sauce

Another highly useful chili ingredient: chili sauce. And that, folks, is Heinz's chili sauce--not that cheap Chinese stuff you buy for half the price, and tastes like tomato glue. You want quality. Chili sauce is very useful when spicing up stews, making Bolognese (at this point I gotta be an expert within this field), and when making sauces. Imagine you've got the meat and the potatoes/rice, but lack barbeque sauce. Friends are waiting. What are you going to do? You mix one bottle of Crème fraîche (sour cream) with Heinz's chili sauce until it's softly red in color. Add any spice you like (my favorite picks: basil, dragoon, Italian salad spice mix (!), or even chili powder), and you'll be the hero of the day. Chili sauce always works when you want a chili/tomato taste stronger than simply using ketchup (also known as tomato rescue resource).

Cheese

People on paleo-diets, please jump to the next header. For the rest of you: always have cheese at home, and by this I don't mean just a block of cheese and a cheese slicer to put something on your sandwich. Have you got one of those nasty shredders that will destroy your knuckles if you're not careful? Good. When the cheese is down to its last good-tasting usefulness, most people throw their cheese out. They're idiots, because if you shred that last big piece of cheese down and place it in the freezer, you've got an excellent cooking ingredient whenever you want to make a stew with a cheesy substance. Or simply place some on top of a hot meat dish, letting it melt like you see on those cheesy (pun intended) commercials. Shredded cheese can be used pretty much anytime, so always keep a small bag in the freezer. The general idea here: don't throw out food that can be useful later.

Onion

If you're asking me why you want to store onions at home, it's doubtful anyone will take you seriously as a chef. Onions are part of most dishes today, because they're extremely good for your health, last pretty long, and add taste to most common dishes involving meat, veggies and fish. As previously mentioned, they're also useful when making different kinds of salads. It might be worth mentioning garlic here as well, which serves similar purposes in cooking, although you want to use it in much smaller amounts, and only with certain dishes, typically involving meat and fish.

Lime/Lemon

Whichever suits you best, a lime or a lemon is always useful to have at home. Some people squeeze it over fish as a spice, others want it in stews to give it character. Me, drinking no sugary juices from the supermarket, prefer to squeeze one lime (including any fruit meat) per 5 dl of cold water = best home made juice ever. These can be stored for a longer period of time in the fridge and don't occupy too much space. They’re also good when mixing vodka drinks during parties, and seem to work well in smaller amounts in salad dressings.

Cornstarch

Lastly, whenever you're making sauces or stews, recipes always advise you to use flour during boiling to thicken the substance. As most people have noticed, amateurs (including myself) and professionals alike, regular flour is not very effective for this end. In fact, it kind of sucks. I'm aware of the modified flour products that exist to thicken sauces ("ideal flour" and what have you), but I've personally found them equally useless. The solution: cornstarch. Extremely effective; if you use 4-5 tablespoons of flour to thicken 1 litre of stew, you will only need 1 tablespoon of cornstarch for the same job. It's very useful and beats both regular and modified flour by far.