The Eight Dinners I Started With. Seven of Them Came Out of a Jar or a Packet.
I grew up in a house where you cooked from scratch. My parents had an allotment, so food was something you grew and then cooked, not something you picked up on the way home. When my wife and I got our first home, I assumed I'd carry on the same way.
And I did cook. Most nights, properly. Saturday was takeaway night, a ritual from the start: Chinese, Indian, and sometimes pizza or kebabs. The rest of the week, these were the dinners I started with:
- Spaghetti carbonara
- Mexican chilli con carne
- Shepherd's pie
- Spaghetti bolognese
- Roast dinner
- Toad in the hole
- Sweet and sour chicken
- A curry from a sauce jar
Seven of those eight came out of a packet mix or a jar. I tried plenty of different ones over the years, but the pattern was the same: in seven dinners, the flavour had already been made by somebody else. I was cooking from scratch in my own head. In practice, the part that makes a dish taste of something was in a jar.
What changed it was Chinese food
Takeaway was part of our week, and I've always loved Chinese and Indian cooking, so I set out to learn how to make those dishes at home. That meant learning to make the flavour myself, not open it.
The first dish I think of when I think about mastering something is egg fried rice. It sounds so simple now. It wasn't then, and getting it right was the moment I thought, I can actually do this.
Once I could do that, I carried it over. The sweet and sour chicken, the curry, the chilli con carne, the shepherd's pie: one by one, over years, I swapped the jar and the packet for fresh ingredients. It wasn't a decision I made on one day. It happened a dinner at a time.
It sped up when I started working with Mac
Mac is a trained chef, and the blends we make together mean I'm cooking a much wider range than I ever did before. I have a longer list now than most people do. But I still remember where it started, and I still remember how much of the start was somebody else's flavour in a jar.
Where we are now
I'm trying to take as much ultra-processed food out of what we eat as I can. I haven't managed all of it, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Some weeks the shortcut wins. What I know is that the flavour is the part worth learning first, because once you can make that, the rest gets easier.
Home Made Chinese (still experimenting)
Try writing your own list
I did this years ago without thinking much about it, and the list I found is the reason I'm writing this. Write down the dinners you cook on repeat, then look at how many of them have something from a jar or a packet underneath. You might be surprised, like I was.
Learning to cook was never really the point for me. The point is helping other people do it, and it's taken me a long time to get here. We're in this together.
If you want to start where I started: our Chicken Tikka Masala Curry and Chinese Salt and Pepper Beef Stir-Fry are good first steps away from the jar.
