Pureed cheeseburger?????

[Ally]

Osc, I think that I love you.

This has been a bee in my bonnet for ages.

Fresh food, cooked at home, is cheaper and more nutritious than processed pap. It does not take ages to do, so the time argument is pointless. It does not need a chef's cooking skills, it is basic every day food after all. And yes, the TV chefs have a lot to answer for with their sea salt and virgin olive oil and organically grown saffron.

I once watched Gary Rhodes cook the 'perfect fried egg' and I could have tiled my bathroom floor with the end result.

If you can turn on a stove, and know what a pan is, the world is your oyster.

Must be a small bathroom floor.

Tsk, I was thinking of multiple fried eggs laid edge to edge and properly grouted.

Some wimmin.

Nobody has a one egg sized bathroom.... apart from Travelodge.

Aah see..I am but a simple soul. The 'perfect fried egg' indicated one egg to me.

[Diflower]

Basic cooking is to be compulsory in all schools from next year.
There is a team of chefs helping put the schedule together (not celebs mostly, but I think there are some of those as well), they did a pull-out in the Times the other Saturday, with recipes that children ought to be able to cook by the ages of I think 8,12 and 16? Something like that, but may have started younger than eight.
They were all sensible things, starting with a jacket potato and going through soup, spag bol, etc.
They were saying that when they went on fact-finding tours, to schools purporting to teach cookery, 4 out of 5 were making cupcakes. The first stipulation was that the lessons must be for savoury meals, not sweet treats.

It's been appalling for years. When I worked in Farnborough you would see girls with pushchairs containing children old enough to walk - but it's quicker and less trouble if they're in a pushchair. The poor children would have a bag of chips in front of them - at 10 in the morning. Obviously they'd had no breakfast, and no doubt more chips a couple of hours later and again in the evening.
Again years ago I saw a mother snatch an apple from a small child in the supermarket, saying 'put that back, I've got you sweets'.
One of the very few occasions we've taken the boys to a Burger King there was a girl force-feeding a burger (and bun) to a little boy who could only have been a few months old...
I think the conclusion is that this culture of non-cooking is so endemic there's only any point in getting through to the next generation, by making it compulsory in schools - and about time too.

[Workingman]

I did my PGCE in the mid 90s.

When we observed food tech the children were tasked with 'designing' a sandwich. The highest rated appeared to be the most outlandish - banana and sardines, that sort of thing.

The nutrition value of the sandwich appeared to be insignificant.

[Diflower]

Yep, that's it WM - eldest had to 'design' a pizza - but at no time did he have to make the b****y thing!

[Workingman]

It's true Di, the pupils knew all about the production of 'food', the industrial process, but they knew sod all about 'making' a meal - even a sarnie.

It's dressed up as education and progress.

[Diflower]

He spent an entire term making scones.
First they made - scones.
Then a cobbler (apple). Then a pizza. Then I forget, but once a fortnight for a whole term all he did was make scone dough.
I rather think that was all the teacher knew.

[Diflower]

I went to a grammar school, so domestic science was not a priority. What we got was alternate terms with needlework.
And to make it more 'academic', half the lesson was on nutrition, or other domestic tasks like washing-up.
Yes, we had a lesson on washing-up But do you know what, I still hear our teacher telling us that a porridge saucepan should be soaked in cold water, not hot, as hot water cooks the porridge onto the pan!

Our first cookery lesson was tea and sandwiches. Now at 11, I'd been making tea for my parents for about 5 or 6 years, but I'm sure some of the rest of the class hadn't, and we sure did learn the right way to do it, with both loose tea and teabags.
And although we laughed at the sandwich idea, it was quite good, she taught us that you could mix the filling before putting it between the slices of bread. For instance grate cheese, mix with pickle, I would never have done that.

The second lesson was coffee and toast And this was only instant coffee, but then putting it into a coffee pot, as was the fashion. And yes, to a lot of us this seemed ridiculous, but at least they had the sense to start at the very beginning
Next was a layered salad, in a plastic tub so we could take it home. But my first encounter with salad dressing!

Lesson four was the breakthrough, it was soup (vegetable) As you know I've been making it ever since, and to this day once in a while I look at that very recipe, copied carefully into my falling-apart notebook. Dice the vegetables, all the same size, and it had red lentils in, not liquidised of course but thickened with a teaspoon of cornflour mixed with cold water.

After that I think was bread rolls, a wonderful lesson...note none of these were cakes or sweets but life's essentials. Rock buns came a few lessons later, but we never did do anything piled with icing.

[Workingman]

When leaving for Uni in Newcastle my son asked for.... a laptop, a mobile, a DVD player...

No, he wanted a wok and spices! He knew how to cook and figured that turning out stir-frys and curries could earn him a few bob... and impress the girls.

My daughter is the first on the invitation list for any party.... because they know that at 1am she can knock out a cracking meal.

Mum and I did well with those two.

[Diflower]

You sure did WM
I spent a good few years teaching various blokes how to cook, whether boyfriends or not!
I remember being invited especially to a very well-to-do shared flat, purely because I'd mentioned scrambled eggs

[Workingman]

The thing is Di, that the basics are not that hard to master. Delia showed us all that.

From day to day all we want is basic grub.... and it's a doddle.

I have a sort of menu of about twenty meals. It means that I don't have the same thing twice in about three weeks. Hard to do? No.