How Basic is your Home Cooking?

At first it might sound like a crazy question, but what is cooking? Or, to be more precise, when does warming up food become basic home cooking?

A trip to the supermarket. Rush home with your frozen, pre-prepared meal. Open the packet and toss the frozen meal into the microwave oven. Set to high and turn the dial to 3 minutes. Wait for the ping then open the microwave oven door. Let the bubbling, steaming meal stand for two minutes. Now you're ready to sit down in front of your favourite TV show with your meal which is now too cool to burn off the outermost layers of your tongue.

Is that cooking? You had to use a cooking appliance. Control the time. Set the temperature. You knew your food needed two minutes to stand untouched when you took it out of your microwave oven. But you didn't prepare any ingredients. You didn't mix anything together. You didn't do anything to the food beyond changing its temperature. In short, you didn't cook anything, so we can't consider it to be even the most basic home cooking. Sorry.

Cooking requires knowlege of a host of techniques and skills. What's the best way to peel a carrot? How do you blanche a vegetable? How do you know when a chicken is done? How do you braise a steak? Even making mashed potatoes needs a certain amount of cooking equipment and some knowledge of basic home cooking.

The point is, if your cooking skills extend only as far as using a microwave to warm-up pre-prepared food, then you don't cook. And if you don't cook, you're missing out on one of the world's most rewarding experiences - even if you can only manage the basics. And the most basic reward of basic home cooking? A varied, healthy diet.