Holcombe - How to Feed Your Whole Family a Healthy, Balanced Diet with Very Little Money: and hardly any time, even if you have a tiny kitchen, only three saucepans (one with an ill-fitting lid) and no fancy

Have you ever spent a small fortune in the supermarket and still struggled to put a decent meal together? Are your children always complaining theyre hungry even though they eat constantly? Do you own a set of expensive saucepans or have a kitchen full of gadgets you never use? Would you like to cook more and eat together as a family if only you had the time?

Time, or lack of it, is probably the reason most of us give for not cooking these days, but less than forty years ago almost everyone cooked at least one proper meal from scratch every day even though not everyone owned a fridge, let alone all the other labour saving devices we take for granted today. Maybe we do have more commitments in some areas of our lives than previous generations, but when it comes to food, not only do we have a much greater variety to choose from, we also have twenty-four hour supermarkets, internet shopping, home deliveries, endless cookery programmes on TV, hundreds of recipe books and microwave ovens that sell for smaller sums of money than youd spend on a family meal in a fast food outlet.

To hear some people talk youd think no one had ever been busy until about 1985, but no matter where you live or what your circumstances are, the truth is its still possible to put a balanced meal together in less time that it takes to dial up a pizza and wait for it to be delivered (cold usually) to your door.

And if recent reports are to be believed, there must be more cookery books gathering dust in designer kitchens in this country than there are people who cook regularly, so apart from the old argument about having no time, whats putting people off?

Its easy to be taken in by some convenience foods; beautifully packaged, cleverly advertised and presented as healthy food thats good for us and will make life easier. But what thousands of people probably dont realise is that they can make a far better shepherds pie or toad in the hole themselves just by following a very simple recipe and who can blame them? So seductive are some of the TV commercials, you could be forgiven for thinking its a privilege to be allowed inside the shop to spend your money in the first place.

But no ones doing us any favours, least of all the major stores with their gorgeous displays, catchy slogans and buy-one- get-one-free deals. And even though the ingredients in every product are printed on the packaging its easy to be misled. People in a hurry tend to grab whatever looks good and place their trust in the brand name without stopping to study the small print, or even really knowing what theyre looking for.

The funny thing about convenience food at least it would be funny, if we werent the fattest nation in Europe and getting bigger all the time is its not even that convenient. Once youve removed the packaging, read the instructions, pierced the film lid (or not), waited, taken the tray out halfway through the cooking time to stir the food, waited again, let it stand for two minutes, scalded yourself on the steam, searched in vain for a piece of meat amongst the gunk, wolfed the lot in four minutes flat and wondered what else there is to eat because youre still hungry, it might occur to you that the little bit of effort you saved by not cooking your own dinner wasnt really justified by the end result.

The other food myth that often gets repeated is that the unhealthiest foods are the least expensive, and that some people, especially families on very low incomes, only resort to eating them because they have no choice. But this simply isnt true. A weeks worth of good quality meat and fish with lots of potatoes, rice, pasta, vegetables, fruit and other whole foods costs no more than the same amount of cheap chicken, burgers, pies, reconstituted potatoes, instant microwave meals and fizzy drinks.

I know cooking isnt everyones idea of fun and some people will never enjoy it, which is why this book isnt about learning to cook complicated meals that take hours to prepare and only minutes for your kids to reject. You dont have to be a great cook, or even a particularly good one. You dont have to go shopping more often than you want to, or spend more money than you can afford. Theres nothing here that you cant buy from any of the big supermarkets assuming thats where you do your shopping because, like me, youre not lucky enough to have anything better where you live. And there are no expensive ingredients with unfamiliar names. Some of the recipes can be thrown together in minutes and a very few dont involve any cooking at all. True, they all contain a certain amount of fat, sugar and salt, but nowhere near as much as youd find in commercially prepared food and at least the nutrients are there as well.

There seems to be an ever-changing list of so-called super foods these days and I even came across a series of articles in one parenting magazine under what I thought was the very bad taste headline: Cancer-proof Your Kids. But in spite of so much food knowledge there are still people who think we need sugar for energy (not necessarily; we get energy from all our food), that diet colas are better than those containing sugar when theyre potentially worse (because of the chemicals in artificial sweeteners,) or who, when asked to name a typical English food say quiche.