Buy Ingredients Online And Celebrate Our National Achievement!

If you're about to head off to buy ingredients for your family's dinner you may wish to revel in the fact that it has just been announced that the British are now the gourmet champions of the world. At least as far as the amount of time we spend cooking is concerned. The French have long had a reputation for enjoying cooking and good food, referring to us rather derogatorily as 'les rosbif', but in fact we have come out ahead of the French in a new survey analysing the amount of time we send in the kitchen cooking meals for ourselves is concerned.

We also top the poll as far as how many of us bother to cook a proper meal for our family on a regular basis, showing that we are clearly moving forwards in terms of cooking and food. Of course, the French may well turn around and suggest that we are only spending longer in the kitchen than they are because we're so bad at cooking we just take a lot longer to do things, however, that is likely to be as accurate as their assertion that all we eat are fish and chips, Yorkshire puddings and roast beef. Not that there's much wrong with any of those as far as I'm concerned!

But when it comes to us heading out to buy ingredients for our food we don't tend to look for gourmet ingredients as often as some other nations. In part this is because we simply don't have as convenient access to such gourmet ingredients as our friends on the continent. Supermarkets have so dominated our shopping habits that we are very much limited by the range on offer there, and since supermarkets necessarily cater for the common denominator and the bottom line they aren't likely to offer many specialist ingredients.

Many of the gourmet items we might otherwise choose to buy have short shelf lives or low profit margins, and so we don't find them available as easily as we might on the continent. This is a shame, because whether it's because of people like Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver, the wealth of cookery programs, books and household gadgets, we are all making a much more concerted effort to provide good home cooked food for ourselves and our families, and this is to be celebrated.

What better way of celebrating coming out ahead of the French for cooking than choosing to buy ingredients which take our traditional recipes to a new level? In fact it doesn't have to take much effort to completely transform traditional meals into something which will certainly leave our continental rivals standing, a little like their petit escargots!

Although the range of ingredients on offer may be relatively limited at the supermarket, you may find that there are still one or two little specialist shops in your nearest town. It's important to try to support such outlets as they provide an important service, and one which should be growing in importance. But if you don't have convenient access to such an outlet then there's a plethora of perfect pickings online!

If you want to buy ingredients such as goose fat, porcini mushrooms or fois gras and you can't find it on your local shop then have a quick look online. The internet has brought us many advantages, and in line with our growing love of home cooking is a growing array of online retailers offering a wide range of affordable gourmet ingredients. You'll be amazed how easy it is to transform something like a traditional risotto by replacing the cardboard mushrooms from the supermarket with dried porcini mushrooms, or your traditional fat with goose fat for your roast potatoes. Vive la cooking!