With Gusto

There is an ad on YouTube at the moment where a guy is sent out to buy some rice.

Which rice? He asks, as he is confronted with a wall of packed rice twenty feet high and wider than the screen.

A nightmare!

The solution, it would appear is a box of ingredients and menu card, delivered to your door, containing all you need to make a meal.

Cooking is not difficult. And neither is shopping.

Online we have more recipes than we could cook in a lifetime, the only problem is which ones to cook. Sometimes Jools just picks an ingredient to see what I can find to make with it. It is fun and we learn new dishes.

We go shopping, and when we do, we squeeze fruit and vegetables, only buy meat from the butcher, fish from the fishmonger when we get to Rye. Knowing your food and where it comes from helps make better food.

Are we so busy that we can't find time to go to a supermaket, or better still a market if you live in a city, and buy what is seasonal and looks good?

I suppose its the next step along from click and collect where the shop delivers your order, its contents having been picked. But is that now too inconvenient?

I appreciate not everyone is retired, or works from home and can spend all day between meetings and mails making a proper ragu or focaccia bread, but that can be made in batches, frozen to be defrosted and heated in mere minutes.

Before I met Jools, when I was living alone, I used to spend half a day at weekends making a huge bowl of chilli, stew or soup so all I had to do war warm it up when I got in from work. Too busy to do that?

There are thousands of meal that can be prepared and cooked in half an hour or less, and we should take care what we put into our bodies, support our local businesses where and when we can.