WHEN it comes to food and blokes, it seems there are two categories.
There are those - such as Gordon Ramsay and Rick Stein - who dominate the culinary world and are gastronomically superior beings.
- Beat Heat Eat, by Dean Lahn. Wakefield Press, rrp $19.95
And then there are those who have no idea and are plain useless.
Give them a chop and a pair of tongs and they may be OK, but otherwise cooking for such chaps equates to buying takeaway and reheating it in the microwave.
This book is for the second category.
Beat Heat Eat's menu includes such delights as Coke Chicken, Beer Chicken - which involves stuffing a beer can in the bird's cavity - and Boy Burgers.
Each recipe is laid out like a car manual, with illustrations of the tools required and diagrams indicating what should be done with them.
Apparently blokes who can't cook can't spell either, as chapter headings include "Qwik Fixes" and "Snaks".
The introduction starts with the premise "if you don't eat you will die", which suggests these are recipes about survival rather than kitchen prowess.
To be fair, the book is ideal for first-home leavers. And certainly there are many men out there who have reached middle age relying entirely on their better-half for a daily feed.
This book, too, is for them - and any man in your life who needs to crank his diet up a notch.
