A Bloke's Guide to Cooking

1. A properly balanced meal consists of meat, beer and one or fewer vegetable ingredients. The permitted vegetables are: instant mashed potato, frozen peas or chips (bought from takeaway - under no circumstances attempt to cook your own).
2. Taking any active part in food preparation is called "cooking". This may include choosing the pizza toppings, phoning the order to the curry house and putting the frozen lasagne into the microwave.
3. Salad is for rabbits.
4. The complete list of allowable BBQ foods is: Beer, Hamburgers, Sausages, Steak, Tomato Sauce, Bread. But not too much bread.
5. Food does not age when put in the fridge. In future, people seeking the secret of eternal life will spend years in their fridges, wrapped in cling-film.
6. It stands to reason that if a food is full of preservatives, then the consumer who eats it will also age slower, and remain healthier for longer.
7. The Bachelor should always be ready to entertain unexpected guests: keep plenty of beer in the fridge.
8. The correct place for dirty pots, pans and plates is in artistic and precarious piles in the sink, on tables, benches and chairs, on top of the TV, on the floor or in the garden. In each pile the smallest item should always be used for the base. Alternatively,dishes can be stacked in the bath and cleaned by soaking in bath water and hosing them off.
9. The correct time to wash dirty plates is right before you next want to use them.
10. Evil things from months ago lurk in the back of food cupboards and fridges. Never explore the dark reaches beyond the warm, comforting light that plays on the (relatively) recently bought items in the front. Whatever is going on in the back should be left alone.
11. No potato is ripe until it has developed leaves and a root system of its own.
12. Rice never goes off.
13. Beer should never get the chance.
14. Everything tastes better fried.
15. Food dropped on the floor is best cleaned by holding it carefully and blowing on it. This works regardless of what was on the boots you wore in the kitchen yesterday, where your dog went last night and whether or not you ever turned on a vacuum cleaner. Cleaning is unnecessary if the food has been on the floor for less that three seconds as germs need this amount of time to migrate from the floor to the food. This is known as the three second rule.
16. Dessert is for wimps.
17. The ultimate aim of cooking is to use only one pot in the process. For maximum points, that pot should be a frying pan.
18. The correct procedure to follow whenever anything goes wrong is to order pizza. The list of possible things going wrong includes failure to buy food, tiredness, rain, visitors, or a lack of visitors. It is amazing how much can go wrong.
19. Cleaning the cooking scraps out of the pot you last used last week ruins the flavour of the meal you try to cook in the same pot tonight. Better to just use it anyway.
20. Cooking the food is easy. Eating it afterwards is the hard part.