DIY it yourself

I'm feeling very home-made at the moment.

I've just had some more of the delicious chicken and mushroom soup that I made. A couple of weeks ago I was eating beetroot soup, not only that I had made myself but with beetroot that I had grown myself. And last night's mash potato was also home-grown.

But it got me thinking, just how home-made is home-made?

The beetroot soup was probably about as home-made as you can get. At the other extreme is the restaurant meal where you don't grown the food yourself, you don't even cook it yourself. Or the takeaway. But at least with the takeaway you are probably eating it at home (or wandering down the street dripping kebab everywhere). But where in the middle does it stop being home-made?

For example, the chicken and mushroom soup - I bought all the ingredients. Yet everyone would say this is home-made food. And so almost all of the food I make is home-made because I cook pretty much from scratch.

But one of my colleagues recently 'home-made' a Christmas pudding, only I'm not convinced it was home-made. He bought a pack which contained all the ingredients he needed, pre-weighed out. All he had to do was mix them together and cook it. There are 'bread packs' which contain all the flour, yeast and everything not only weighed but pre-mixed. All you do is add water and bake.

Obviously with these things there are still elements to go wrong - you could add too much water or bake for too long and burn it. But the same could be said for a cook-at-home pizza. Yet no-one is going to try to argue that because I put it in the oven for a quarter of an hour I have made it.

The local supermarket has just started selling 'deli packs' - essentially the same as pudding mix. You get given a portion of chicken, chopped and ready to cook; with a portion of freshly chopped vegetables; a pack of ready-to-use noodles; with a sachet of sauce to pour on. The idea is that you fry up the chicken, add the vegetables and noodles, stir in the sauce and voila, you have a home-made chicken stirfry. Or do you? Shouldn't I be buying the chicken and vegetables myself and cutting them up? Should I make the sauce myself from entirely fresh ingredients? All hand-picked from my own garden?

Stir-in sauces were all the rave a few years ago. You chose the main ingredients and selected a sauce with the curry spices ready mixed in the sauce for you. But they were popular for a couple of reasons - mostly down to the fact that people approached these particular sauces with trepidation, considering the careful mix of spices the preserve of the professional. These stir-in sauces allowed you to have a curry at home without having to know how to actually make it. They also (should have) save you cluttering up your kitchen with dozens of spice jars and racks, though everyone probably has a jar of cloves that remain unloved. These new deli-packs go one step further - you don't even choose the ingredients, just the style.

And it isn't just the kitchen either. Anyone who knows me will tell you I love my DIY. There is barely an hour when I am at home that I'm not filling, screwing or banging. And not in a good way. But how 'myselfed' is my work? I use a powertool to drill the hole. I've started using a powertool now to screw as well; so it isn't really 'me' that is doing it. Yes I may be deciding where I want to put the door, but the door itself comes ready made - someone else has glued and screwed the jambs and the panels. Maybe I should be doing that to claim proper DIY? And cutting down the trees to make the panels and jambs. And obviously moulding, styling and firing the ceramics in the bathroom too.

And I need to be very careful with this, because I'm ending up talking myself out of my own accomplishments if I'm not careful. Yes, I had a lovely flapjack, but I didn't make it myself. All I did was pick the pears, puree them, mix them with oats, butter and sugar and bake them for 20 minutes. I certainly didn't sow my oats.