Cooking

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What you'll need for your cupboard:

One knife for 'General' use, one smaller knife for fruit and veg, and some scissors - all sorts of uses for these but use nail-clippers for personal hygiene please! Chopping board - plastic for fruit and veg and wooden for bread if you need it. Spoon - wooden for the purpose of "Stirring" (a technical term not covered later). Strainer - for all that pasta and rice. Tin opener and bottle-opener. Frying pan, Saucepan (large, small, and medium preferrable), Casserole Dish. Washing-up bowl. Washing disposables fairly obvious but do also go for paper towels and plenty of teatowels as violence has been known in persuading housemates to clean the towels.

If you're out to impress you will be following recipes. To this end we watched a lot of day-time cookery programs and came up with the fools guide to posh cooking words:

Boil - Vigorous bubbling - No real use for most things other than tea and potatoes and, even then, the potatoes should probably be simmered;
Simmer - What you should usually be doing when you're boiling. Still bubbling but very, very, gently. Doesn't break thing up like boiling does.....which is good;
'Al Dente' - Pasta that is a little firm i.e. not slush;

You may well find that pasta becomes your staple foodstuff - cheap, quick, easy, and pretty good for you really. There are many different kinds of pasta but most fall into either the Spaghetti (thin sticks), Noodles (flat long tapes) and Macaroni (tubes). Always follow the instructions and use a kettle to boil the water before putting it in the pan - add some salt and a tiny drop of oil to stop the pasta forming lumps.