Let's think about what you're going to need before you start.

A chook - This is probably the most important aspect of the recipe, so make sure you get a good one. Free range birds ARE a little more expensive, but they taste about 50% better, so make the investment. Chickens generally come in small, medium and large. We're going to be using this for more than one meal, so get a fairly good sized one. (closer to 2kg than 1.5). If you're squeamish about handling a raw chook, now is the time to speak up, because we're going to get fairly intimate with this bird in the next few minutes...

I pulled my crockpot from its hiding place on top of the cupboard early on Sunday morning and thought about what I was going to do with it.

I had bought some "osso bucco" sliced beef shins at the market on Friday, so I thought I would knock up a classic hearty Italian osso bucco.

Literally "bone with a hole" in Italian, the classic recipe calls for tomatoes, white wine, chicken stock and the beef, along with a healthy crop of garlic (my favourite recipe calls for seven cloves). Classical peasant dishes like osso bucco, however, are inevitably sufficiently robust to allow a bit of tinkering around the edges, or substitution if you don't have the exact ingredients called for. In this case, we didn't have any white wine in the house, so I used red. If you're totally out of booze, then you can just add more stock, although the end product will suffer a little from lack of complexity in the flavouring.

I began cooking chiefly because I love to eat. My dad was a huge influence growing up, he was the main cook in our house, and he's still the first person I turn to for advice if I'm working on something that won't turn out right.

He taught me and my brothers to be confident in the kitchen. We learned early on that, with a good grasp of the fundamentals, and a knowledge of what flavours work together, we could make pretty much anything from scratch.