‘Easy’ cookery shows

Wasting a bit of time last night, the Boy Wonder and I watched a bit of ‘Delia’ in which she claimed to be demonstrating recipes for people who are ‘afraid to cook’ or ‘don’t have time to cook’. Supposedly showing people how to cook ‘on busy days, or if they lack confidence’, her first dish was a salmon and quails’ eggs pie, featuring cornichons, capers and fresh dill. Excuse me? I thought this was supposed to be for busy people who don’t have time to cook, so who are these people who don’t have time to cook anything fancy, but somehow have plenty of time to pop to the shops for quails’ eggs and fresh dill? The element of the show which seems to be designed for a busy chef is that she’s using ready-made mash and ready grated cheese, but I think a recipe involving stuff you can’t buy from your local Spar is probably not a winner for the busy or underconfident, even with two slightly easy ingredients flung on top. Other dishes from last night’s efforts included Peruvian potato wedges with boiled eggs, olives and peppers, which involved using a food processor to make a sauce containing 9 ingredients, one of which was walnuts (who hasn’t got them hanging around in their cupboard?), so already the time saved by using pre-prepared potato wedges has been (pardon the pun) eaten up by making the sauce, boiling the eggs and messing around with peppers and olives. There was also some rather disturbing looking (by which I mean it had the appearance of cooked sick) bread, which seemed a needlessly complicated way of ‘saving time on busy days’. She may as well have called it ‘cooking for the lazy middle classes’, although she did in fact save me and the Boy Wonder plenty of cooking time last night – shortly after her assertion that everyone has a jar of roasted peppers in their cupboard we decided to go out and get fish and chips.