As well as being great fun, cooking your own food can save a fortune. Having friends round for dinner can be far cheaper than eating out, whilst ready meals are a rip off as well as being unhealthy.

There are literally thousands of great cookery websites where you can find recipes for just about anything. One of the very best is the BBC Food recipe website:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/

The Telegraph also has a very good recipes section on its website:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/recipes/

Cooking by Numbers suggests recipes based on what ingredients you've got in the house:

http://www.cookingbynumbers.com/

The Frugal Cook has a lot of good advice on cooking economically:

http://thefrugalcook.blogspot.com/

Foodbuzz is a food blogging site which has had over 140,000 recipes posted to it:

http://www.foodbuzz.com/recipes

Reactive Cooking has hundreds of great recipes, based on the idea of using up what you've got in the fridge:

http://www.reactivecooking.com/

101 Cookbooks is a recipe site by someone who has more than a hundred cookbooks, and it shows:

http://www.101cookbooks.com/

The Observer recently ran a good feature listing fifty of the best simple recipes:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/feb/22/simple-recipes-nobu-ivy-cod-fishcakes

Favourite Cookbooks

I had wondered about adding this, as they're not exactly cheap, but here's a list of our favourite cookbooks, ones that we've never regretted buying:

• Leith's Cookery Bible, Pru Leith (you can get this hugely reduced at the discount book stall at Spitalfields market on Sundays if you live in or near London)

• Moro, Sam & Sam Clark

• Tamarind & Saffron, Claudia Roden

• The River Cafe Cook Book (the first one), Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers. (I'm not sure we would ever have been able to afford to go to their restaurant)

Learning How to Cook

I love cooking, but I don't really remember anyone teaching me how to do it. I suppose, in fairness, my Dad did show me how to make his version of spaghetti bolognese, chilli con carne and beef curry with garam masala and raisins. (The recipe was on the side of the garam masala tin.) My wife mocks me for always sticking fairly exactly to recipes (she's more a handful of this and a handful of that sort of person), but no one (friends or family) has yet settled the dispute as to which of us is the better cook. (Perhaps they're just too polite to tell me the truth...)

I naively believe that in order to cook, all you need to do is open the recipe book, make sure you've got all the ingredients, which you kind of need to have bought in advance and then follow what it says in the book.

I don't entirely understand the need for the televised campaigns to browbeat the nation into cooking, although I don't think publicity for good food is necessarily a bad thing. Nor do I really believe that introducing more "food science" classes into schools would solve the problem - the name they give the subject gives a clue as to just how far away from a solution it might be. I can't see how the previous name, "home economics", would have engendered a love of cooking either.

As far as I'm concerned the problem is a more general one - successive governments have turned the education system into a mindless, tick-box, multiple-choice, over-tested, under-inspired apparatus which provides little opportunity for learning or creativity.

The only hope for good food, and lots of other good things, is a revival in inspired learning and teaching in normal schools - starting with reading, riting, rithmetic and moving on once people can actually read and write (probably a tall order given how far things have gone) to science (for science's sake), literature, languages (living and dead) and history (not just Henry VIII and Hitler, nor just a sanitized history of the British Empire, but an overview of world history - including the less than glorious bits), not forgetting arts and crafts, and music. An introduction to philosophy wouldn't go amiss either, as long as it wasn't the government of the day deciding what should go on the curriculum.

I'm sure that if the education system could be rescued, we wouldn't really need to worry about good cooking and healthy food, but whether we're likely in the forseeable future to get a government that would be up to rescuing, or would even have a genuine desire to rescue the education system, is sadly a different matter.

(On the only very partially related subject of history, E.H.Gombrich's "A Little History of the World", ISBN 030014332X, makes a fantastic introduction for children.)