So we are, according to one Rosemary Bennett, a nation of unadventurous cooks. G2 has today gone to the trouble of getting a bunch of chefs to recommend the best recipes for a number of dishes because of the results of a survey, that show:
Just six dishes account for the most frequent meals in 98% of British households despite the best efforts of Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay. A group of more than 1,400 families were questioned on the meals they cooked most often. Almost a third (30%) prepared roast chicken most regularly, with spaghetti bolognese (27%) and stir fry (12%) the next most popular. Then came sausage and mash at 12%, followed by curries (10%) and pork chops (7%).
I recognise the truth of that in my own kitchen, but I don't think they're bad options. Apart from pork chops, which I've always considered as exciting as chewing coasters, some of these are at least semi-regular occurrences - sausage and mash and roast chickens (which, here in healthyeatingsville are reserved for special occasions, annoyingly) - and some are really regular, such as stir fries.
It's not like there's only one type of stir fry. While I have about two or three stir fries in a week, they're of wildly differing consistencies and flavours, noodled or not, coconutty, spicy, touched with black beans or rich dark flavours or lightly sprinkled with ginger or orange juice, they might be vegetable-heavy or sometimes bridging out into crazy "handful of prawns" territory or even meatier - I'm pretty sure that everyone isn't cooking the same thing as much as I'm sure that I never manage to cook the same thing twice.
And the exact definition of a curry just comes from the idea of spiced or seasoned stew - and either meat or vegetables at that. We'll probably cook something that could be described as a curry once a week too, but it definitely isn't the same dish every time. It seems a little unfair to lump these all up into a narrow term and use them to accuse us of being unimaginative.
We all have staples in our eating habits. We rely on certainties when we're lacking in time and need a bit help when we're too tired to be creative or imaginative. And there's nothing wrong with that. I should think we have many more classic regular meals that don't appear on this list: in my household, along with these surveyed certainties, you'll find a meal of wholewheat pancakes, cottage cheese and various roast vegetable bowls at least once a week, or fajitas, or something like - because to me, an assemble-it-yourself meal that takes forever to eat and involves a lot of sitting around and talking is a staple.
So what other recipes provide "staple meals" for you - and if the survey rings true and the named dishes really do make up a lot of our nation's weekly diet, what's the flavoursome magic touch that you add that is the reason you keep wanting to cook it?
