Scooby Doo taught me to cook.
It’s true. (Kind of.)
When I was a kid, I used to get Scooby’s comic. Each week, in between exposing dodgy geezers posing as ghosts in abandoned theme parks, Scooby would offer his readers a recipe. So one Saturday, I asked my mum whether I could make Scooby’s ‘Cheesey Feet Toast’. It wasn’t especially complicated: Marmite on toast with a layer of cheese on top and then you then stuck it all under the grill until the cheese had melted. But it tasted sublime. With the benefit of hindsight, that was probably less to do with the flavour profile and more about an infant’s sense of pride at having ‘cooked’ something for the very first time. As I’ve grown older, I’ve loved observing that same pride in my own and others’ kids. Where some blokes get misty eyed when they see young’uns kick a football or pick up a cricket bat, for me it’s seeing little chefs beaming as they stand beside their culinary creations. It’s one of the many reasons I’m so keen that all kids learn to cook, a theme that the brilliant Tim Maddams indulged me in recently in his excellent podcast series. A former head chef of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage, Tim really knows what’s what (listen, for example, to his advice to me on how to avoid soggy bottoms in my pies!) and all of his podcasts are well worth a listen. He’s been fighting the good fight on food for years and he’s made – and continues to make – an enormous, positive difference as a result. Because Tim, just like Scooby, is dogged. Nick PS – the market reopens in September.