I know I shouldn't like them and I know we've heard they're lethal, but I like Pot Noodles, especially the chilli flavour ones. In fact, I like all processed food, food that nearly doesn't look like food at all.

Pot Noodles are only a recent find (or a re-find, as they accompanied me throughout university) but I also enjoy eating cheese and onion flavoured rice cakes, which a colleague calls "ceiling tiles" and which are about as natural as a piece of styrofoam.

Anyway, my taste buds enjoy processed cuisine because they are so accustomed to it. And the reason for that is because I started reading feminist literature very early in my teens and decided that cooking wasn't something I was ever going to devote my evenings to.

So for most of my adult life, I have lived on frozen fish covered in bread crumbs, super noodles, triangle cheese and Weight Watchers trifles.

Looking back now at my great feminist ideals, I'm not sure how far they've got me. I kicked against learning how to make traditional Asian food that my mum was so expert at because that's all she ever seemed to do.

The only place I remember her being during my childhood was standing by the stove, with steam emanating from the hot chapatis she made every night.

It seemed far too tedious to devote my time to learning how to chop up onions and work out what all the hundreds of different coloured spices actually were.

So the irony, nearly 20 years on, is that now I have to spend lots of my hard earned money on paying for the kind of food I could have been making, if only I'd listened to my mother.

I recently asked four friends round for dinner and then panicked at the thought of what to feed them. I had visions of picking up everything at M&S, but then, because old habits never die, got my mum to make two curry dishes which I passed off as my own. It's sad and not very feminist to get your mum to do it, I thought afterwards.

It's odd that a decision I'd made to feel more empowered in my teen years when my friends didn't care if I cooked for them or not, feels so disempowering now.

I have been to friends' houses and been struck by the array of complicated dishes they - and their boyfriends - can whip up, while I have to make do with a noodle meal topped off with a Mullerice.

In this post-feminist era, it's no longer such a big issue if women toil over a boiling hot stove for hours on end (as long as they choose to do it), or so it seems.

So in the spirit of post feminism, I bought the River Cafe recipe book and Delia Smith's How To Cook (perhaps I'll begin with that one), and even a weighing scale. I might start off with something simple, like learning how to boil rice.