How am I a food snob when I can purchase a cuchina povera garlic bulb for about 20p all the year round? How is garlic powder an improvement on real garlic? I'm scratching my head here. A lot of my cooking is Italian. Tonight we had spaghetti with prawns, lemon, chilli, sundried tomatoes, garlic and rocket. The lemon was a fresh lemon with its juice and zest. The garlic was two cloves finely sliced straight into the hot extra virgin olive oil. The chilli was dried chilli flakes. The rocket was out of my garden. I got the spag perfectly al dente and Mrs Steve gave me 9.5 on ten (a half teaspoon too much lemon). We'd been out all day sitting with my Mum in hospital 50 miles away, which is why I had to resort to dried chilli flakes. The whole thing took me twelve minutes. Why would I cut corners using abject dried garlic? You'll be telling me next to use bottled lemon juice...

Good cooking means not cutting corners via processed ingredients. I will not use dried garlic or any dried herb bar oregano, which works brilliantly for reasons I know not why. I won't use lemon juice out of a bottle. It isn't proper lemon juice. Dull as ditchwater. One of those cushion bags of rocket? Useless. Either grow your own (in my garden I can't stop it) or don't bother. These things make a massive difference. It took me one minute to finely slice two garlic cloves, and my fingers smelled beautifully of cooking. It took me twenty seconds to squeeze the juice from a real lemon. Cut corners and you lose all the joy of real cooking. Anyway, that's what I think...