In the kitchen

Hello and welcome to my new show: Tina's kitchen

Each week, I'll be impressing you all with my culinary skills and offering you some top tips to make life easier in your kitchen.

People who know me will vouch that I'm exceedingly easy to please when it comes to being served up a sumptuous feast - so long as I'm served up a sumptuous feast and not some shitting pigswill that other mongs might find acceptable. There's nothing like well-prepared food that's made from decent ingredients and I find that, armed with good basic equipment, a bit of common sense and lashings of good taste, anybody can cook.


The basics
To start off with, you need to get the right basic equipment:

• Chef's knife (6" blade), paring knife
  
• Knife sharpener (no point having knives unless you keep them sharp and scary)
• Chopping boards
• Stirring implements (spatulas, spoons and the like)
• Colander
• Sieve
• Set of kitchen scales (perhaps)
  
• Set of pans (medium & large sauce pans, frying pan, that kind of affair)
  

Obviously, it's not rocket science - it's not fucking rocket science, it's cooking for fuck's sake - but you're supposed to be equipping your kitchen with things that are supposed to make your life easier. That's right, you're trying to make your life easier, so why then do complete and utter fuckwits buy this shit:

That's right, this is France's finest "Le Creuset" cast iron, enamelled cookware. What a pile of crap.

When I first started university, I was packed off to Leeds with some cheapo crap pans. They were ace, they lasted me all my time there and that was all that was required. Imagine my horror when some posh bird from Northern Ireland rolled up with a full set of Le Creuset pans and casseroles (in orange, of course).

"What the fuck are they?" I asked her as the cupboards started to sag under the collective weight of a casserole, milk pan and a couple of saucepans.

"Oh they're the best you can get you know."

"Oh right, they look a little bit heavy... and doesn't stuff stick to them?"

"Oh I don't know, I can't really cook that well, but I'll get used to them."

"Oh, and the name's Tina, by the way."

Fuck me. This was the lass who always prepared parsley sauce with fish fingers and proceeded to eat them using a fish knife. A fish knife.

This was the lass who did biochemistry with me, who used to sneak into my room to take my finished lab reports so she could copy them because she wouldn't have written hers up in time because she'd have been out clubbing or shagging. "Audrey, I'm not seeing [enter current shag's name] this evening, shall we get some ALCOHOL?" Bitch. We called her "Mort" (for Morticia) because of the black rings around her eyes from all the late nights. She only got a 2ii. HA!

Anyway, I never used them, but watched in awe as she managed to carry a fully-laden saucepan of cooked pasta (and cooking water) to the collander in the sink. "Heeeeeeeave!!"

And it was always pasta in mushroom and creamy sauce, which is like "pasta 'n' snot" as far as I'm concerned, but I'd watch on as they perfected their roux and then mix it in with bogeyfied mushrooms to produce something that looked like a slug mating fest.

Christ. Why do they do it? I pondered, as I tucked into whichever pasta dish I'd be having that evening (always a tomato-based sauce for me - ALWAYS!).

And then there was Jo "I've only had a Twix all day". She was the thinnest person on the planet, but she used to work as a surveyor to fund her studies. She'd come in from work, having only had a Twix all day, and start preparing a casserole (in Le Creuset) and drop scones (on a Le Creuset hot plate thing). Baking! Baking is not compatible with being starving hungry. Eating something cold out of the tin is compatible with being starving hungry. Or those 2 minute noodles - they're ace when you're hungry. Casseroles. Jesus.

Jo didn't like the smell of garlic: "It smells of body odour". This was a student house. Garlic is the prevailing smell of a student house. All student houses smell of garlic because students have to cook with overpowering amounts of the stuff because they don't know about other flavours. Added to this is the pan of four day old chilli con carne on the stove and an overflowing kitchen bin. Student house = GARLIC.

Jo was lovely though: very polite and very hard working. But she didn't like garlic. She did however progress to onions in the time that I knew her, which is just as well for the number of casseroles she made.

Back to Tina's kitchen. After years of watching in wonder at people using Le Creuset pans, I found myself having to use them myself when I was house-sitting in Grimsby in the summer of 1991. Fuck me, they're hard work. I was on the verge of knocking up a block and tackle to lift the fuckers before I got a man to pick them up for me.

This particular type, the one-handled saucepan, is an absolute no-no with my weak and pathetic wrists. There is no way I can even contemplate picking one of those fuckers up without breaking into a sweat and getting a panic attack at the prospect of the impending full thickness burns from when my arms give way and I get covered in scalding liquid.

Word has it that Le Creuset have signed up to be sponsor of next year's World's Strongest Man competition. The final event involves contestants holding an 18" single-handled saucepan filled with boiling water at arms length for as long as possible. Should be a short finale then.

Fucking useless French crap.


Completely unrelated, but perhaps a bit of good news.