Lasagne Soup

Gordon Ramsay and I have something in common, but it's certainly not that I'm a Michelin-starred chef with a chain of smart restaurants and a successful TV career. No, we both went to Stratford-upon-Avon High School. I can only assume that he was significantly more successful at Home Economics than me. And I might be wrong, but I suspect that Ramsay would not entertain the idea of looking at, let alone eating, a toasted cheese and raspberry jam sandwich, which - courtesy of my mother - is one of my favourite, if frowned-upon, lunches.

I got to thinking about food recently after Big Brother contestant Glyn revealed – on national TV, like an idiot – that, at the ripe old age of eighteen, he hadn't ever cooked anything, and hadn't even made a sandwich.

Since our daughter was born a month ago, I have cooked the evening meals in the Smith household. I don't say this from a 'look at me, the New Man' standpoint, nor am I frustrated by the additional domestic chore which typically means we won't sit down to eat until past 8.00. I've never really had any old fashioned views on the respective roles of men and women, and so I've always done my fair share of things around the house. Moreover, I actually really like cooking, so maybe Gordon Ramsay and I have more in common than I thought.

It wasn't always so; when I lived at home with my parents I can't think of a single time that I cooked, either for myself or my family. That's just the way things were in our house, the way we were used to things; the norm. My sister went through a phase of being... a vegetarian, whereas the rest of the house wasn't, so for a while she would make her own meals - generally pasta with tomato sauce and chopped onions. By dint of shiftwork alone, my father cooked his own meals every other week, and once made me McCain's cheese and tomato pizzas and chips while my sister was in hospital having her tonsils out - when he served them, he'd burnt them so badly that a piece of barbecue charcoal would have been nutrionally superior.

So perhaps it wasn't so much that I didn't like cooking as I didn't know how. Certainly my experience of Home Economics at High School validates this. I recall being quite good at simple things like fruit salad (ingredients : one carton orange juice, one can mixed fruit in juice), fruit flan (ingredients : one readymade flan case, one can orange segments, and the really hard part - some jelly), and once made some really good beef burgers; but on the whole my culinary qualifications peaked with some cheese scones - all simple things that would unlikely be served in anything other than the most amateur restaurant.

Once Home Economics became an optional rather than compulsory subject, I enhanced my rudimentary cooking skills by customising Pot Noodles, or 'pimping my noodle' as those crazy MTV kids would probably say. To do this, simply make up your Pot Noodle as normal, but - and here's the genius - before giving it that final all-important-but-easy-to-forget final stir, add herbs and spices; anything will do, really just anything you fancy. If you're lucky, your added ingredients may just tip the potted snack closer to being real food; get it wrong and you'll be left with Pot Ruination.

Knowing that university and self-sufficiency beckoned, I decided that drastic corrective action was required. As if by magic, there among the random General Studies options was a term-long course entitled 'Bedsit Cookery', and begrudgingly - despite all manner of really random General Studies options that would have been much more of a doss - realised that I needed to take this course. Part of my reluctance possibly stemmed from the Soft Cell song 'Bedsitter', which hardly painted the rosiest portrait of life away from home.

At the start of the class, the overbearing and highly intimidating teacher, Miss Hawkins, asked each of us A-level students why we thought we were there, Alcoholics Anonymous style. The course consisted of students from Stratford-upon-Avon's three local schools, the comprehensive (my school, and the location of the course), and the separate girls and boys grammar schools. Cynically, despite their assertions that it was because they were off to Oxford / Cambridge / LSE and needed to know how to jolly well cook, I knew it was because courses at our school finished 25 minutes before the ones at either of the grammar schools. Me, I replied that I wanted to complete the course because I kept burning soup. This is totally true - I still don't understand how, but burning tinned soup had become my then-latest cookery disaster. It did get a laugh, though, even if it was perhaps slightly condescending.

The course was to provide me with many useful tips, such as how to correctly chop an onion, but also yielded two notable trainwrecks of dishes from me. The first was a lasagne which looked, smelt and tasted perfect, except that I'd only included one layer of pasta; thus I invented lasagne soup, but at least I didn't burn it. The other was designed to be a meal for a loved one, wherein I made chicken in a white wine and cream sauce and mixed three times as much water into the sauce which required cornflour to thicken, thus yielding a sauce that tasted of flour. At the time I didn't have a girlfriend, so no-one was offended.

For the first time in the history of my school's General Studies programme, I requested that I sit the course again when it finished, and I did much better. That summer, my last before university, I cooked for myself for a whole week while my parents were on holiday and coped well. At university I ate pretty well, but did consume a lot of cheap doughy pizza. But I generally cooked either a pasta or rice dish with proper vegetables three times a week, and I never once - nor since - ate a kebab. In my first year I also became a vegetarian, though not on grounds of principle; it just meant I had more money available to spend on records. I did lose three stone in my first term, and have only ever gained half a stone since, but these are mere details. By the end of university I was pretty competent at cooking, and I'd even started eating a really well-balanced diet; if you'd said to me on day one, term one, year one, that by my final day I'd be eating loads of fruit and veg, I'd have laughed in your face. But it was true.

Since then, with many trips to expensive hotel restaurants courtesy of my wife's conferencing business and the advent of entertaining clients at lunches, my interest in food - and therefore cooking - has flourished; on a Saturday my first port of call in The Times is Giles Coren's witty restaurants column, followed by Ramsay's recipe section.

I'm not an expert; I still overseason things and as an overhang from my Pot Noodle pimping days, still throw in too many conflicting flavours. But I can follow a recipe and present it well. I find it a really relaxing and enjoyable past-time and never find it a chore. But from time to time, when I'm not paying attention, I'll still burn soup. Only now I'll have made it from scratch, not just opened a tin. And if anyone tells you that grated cheese and raspberry jam toasted sandwiches aren't the tastiest damn sandwiches in this world - you detractors, you non-believers, you know who you are - then you've never tasted perfection...