Henry Dimbleby urges home cooks to keep things simple:
“There’s a place for complex cookery, of course. A brilliant chef, such as [Marco Pierre White], can perform amazing feats of alchemy: taking something as unlovely as a pig’s trotter and turning it into a dish of implausible refinement. But, just as a good writer doesn’t need to use lots of long words to make a point, a skilled chef never loses sight of the simple pleasures.”
A new study from Rush University suggests cooking at home isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be:
“The results showed that the odds of having metabolic syndrome increased as the women aged, but the increase was faster among those who said they spent more time preparing meals. Interestingly, when they looked at the specific metabolic syndrome markers, meal preparation and cleanup time were associated with all of them except abdominal obesity.
“One reason why cooking at home might be linked to disease in middle-aged women? Appelhans says that lots of baked treats — think brownies, cakes, pies — could ‘be lumped in there’ with the cooking.”