Basic kitchen know-how. Cookbook calories.

Article: Chefs advise on kitchen basics

The meat you're sauteeing for tonight's tagine won't brown – what's the problem?

A white sauce you're whipping up for a lasagne is lump-free but tastes floury – how do you avoid this happening next time?

This kind of basic kitchen know-how used to be passed on from mother to daughter, because most families cooked and ate at home. But since the advent of ready meals and a dip in numbers taking home economics or food tech at school, many people have lost touch with what used to be second nature.

Article: Recipes add to calorie blow-out, says study

Note: this is an American study, and may have been conducted using only US cookbooks.

So-called portion distortion, the trend of eating larger and larger servings, is as much a problem with recipes as it is restaurants, and has been going on even longer, a study published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine found.

The study, which looked at how classic recipes have changed during the past 70 years, found a nearly 40 per cent increase in calories per serving for nearly every recipe reviewed, about an extra 77 calories.