Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution: Ambassador Challenge #3:

“Share with us your top tip for food education. What one skill or piece of advice would you teach to/share with others?”

Here’s a piece of advice that we tend to hear fairly often but alas find it hard to take on board:

“Recipes are only guides”

Now, you can say that there are plenty of recipes out there which simply wouldn’t work if you dramatically changed the quantities or ingredients (i.e. baking etc), yeah fine, I see what you mean, but that’s not what I’m talking about.  Substitutions, alternatives and ‘rough measures’ are all good.  My wife’s a great cook, and I’m not sure that she has ever opened a cookbook in her life..  We all need to develop the confidence and self-belief that we can do whatever we want – that’s how the recipes evolved in the first place!

How do you know that your own version isn’t going to turn out better than the recipe you were following verbatim?  If you haven’t got everything that a particular recipe requires, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t make it. Lots of the things that I cook are based on snippets from other recipes that I find in books and online and then splice together to fit what I have to hand.

As I have said before, we could all do with relaxing a little more and taking it easy – cooking shouldn’t be stressful.