Jamie's 30 Minute Meals

Open your horizons with home cooking.

I take my hat off to celebrity chef Jamie Oliver for his success in turning school dropouts into chefs worthy to be employed in his restaurant "Fifteen". And I also applaud the inroads he's made in getting British schools to serve more nutritious lunches. But though I enjoy watching his TV series, "Jamie's 30 Minute Meals", I find the logic he uses to persuade his viewers to move away from takeaways to home cooking seriously flawed.

You see, there's more of what happens before the preparation and cooking process and more of what happens after. In order to cook at home, I have to plan what to cook, make out a shopping list for the ingredients I need to buy and go get them. And by cooking at home, I'll likely end up having to do the after dinner washing up as there will definitely be cooking implements that I can't chuck into the dish washer.

And all these adds-on take time.

So it actually makes better sense to persuade more of us to cook regularly by emphasizing the health benefits for doing so. When I buy takeaways and tv dinners, I've lost control on what's been added into my bought meals. Doing my own preparation and cooking empower me to regain that control. This is especially crucial if I'm big on organic produce, free range chicken and eggs, using less processed produce, and whatever else that may be my personal drivers at given points in my life.

By the way, being handy in the home in this way actually equips me with a new set of skills other than what I've been professionally trained to accomplish in my career. And this can become truly handy when I hit my mid life crisis and so definitely want a career change. Look at Nigella Lawson - she went from being a food critic to a celebrity chef on no other cluedos than that she did loads of home cooking, and did it well.

Now I'm not saying that I want to run my own tv cooking show. But cooking well at home can become the basis of an emergency career switch when I tire of teaching, writing and editing for an income during an economic downturn. Then I'll have a sound basis in starting, say, a catering business in lieu. Just look at Mrs Field's cookie business: she built a cookie empire on the one skill she knew how to do well - bake at home. And mind you, she was only a home maker before she ventured into a business of making and selling yummy biscuits.

So the crux of the matter is this: there are more crucial reasons for doing more home cooking. And I may well become surprised where this adventure will take me.