RAYMOND Blanc can go boil his head as far as I'm concerned. And if that Gordon Ramsey happened to catch his shallots in a mincer tomorrow, I wouldn't shed so much as a single tear.

I don't know what is happening at the moment, but every time I turn around there seems to be a "celebrity chef" (i.e. someone who can cook tripe and talk tripe simultaneously) doing or saying something so spectacularly stupid that I am forced to immediately vent my spleen via my laptop or face the possibility that my head might actually explode like a Fray Bentos pie on a high heat with its lid still firmly in place.

If you have never witnessed a Fray Bentos pie exploding, let me tell you it is quite a sight to behold. Full-scale, ceiling-splattering explosions are rare, but then berks like my former colleague John are pretty rare as well.

Only he could have invited his pals round for a slap-up meal to present them with a main course of tinned pie; only he could have misread a recipe, the entirety of which read "remove lid before cooking"; and only he could have made up for the mishap by taking us all to the local pub with partly-cooked pie in his hair and precisely 2p in his pocket.

But I digress. Let's leave the pie, if not exactly in the sky, then pretty well stuck to the ceiling, and concentrate on the real targets of this week's bout of food-related fury.

Raymond and Gordon. They might sound like a decidedly un-PC gay couple from a terrible 1970s sitcom where men are men, gays are puffs and women are completely superfluous, but they are in fact two of the premier chefs working in Britain today.

Both are promoting books and both have come out with hearty helpings of offensive drivel in order to buy themselves a few extra column inches in the press. You could argue of course that by writing this I am doing my bit to ensure these inchworms achieve their goal, but my head's about to erupt like a minced beef volcano so what do I care?

Raymond "My mind's a" Blanc has laid into parents for feeding their kids microwaveable meals. He said, and I quote, "cooking is an act of love, but microwaving frozen food for your children is an act of hate". Well, if that is in fact true, then I must really, really hate my son. If I have been working all day, it's getting late and he is hungry (which he invariably is, all day, every day) then it seems sensible rather than sadistic to nuke him a shepherd's pie in the microwave while boiling up a pot of peas and carrots. Hardly grounds to call in the NSPCC now, is it?

Madame Blanc might have time to cook a gourmet meal for her kids every night - her hubby admitted he rarely had time to cook at home - but the rest of us live in the real world, where a quick hot meal and more time for play before bedtime is preferable to hours spent slaving over a steaming stove with a rumbly, grumbly child under your feet asking if tea is ready 120 times a minute.

Gordon Ramsey couldn't care less what we feed our kids. In fact he would probably think we were a bunch of namby-pamby liberals for feeding them at all. He's a tough-talking, no-nonsense man's man who couldn't give a toss of a well-dressed salad about anyone but himself - or so he would have us believe in the hope of selling more books.

However, despite the fact that most of these books are likely to be bought by women, Gordon (or The Ram, as I bet he likes to be called) has now turned his faux fury on the female population.

Women, he says, should not be allowed to work in restaurants, and in his establishments in particular, because they get themselves pregnant (note: get Gordon an idiot's guide to sex for Christmas), insist on taking maternity leave, get all emotional every month and - wait for this, it's a real corker - spend too much time in the loo.

Well, I don't know about you, but I have certainly been won over by his highly persuasive arguments.

I mean, how could a man such as he be expected to work with women who have babies and periods and then, to add insult to injury, who demand the right to pop out for an occasional pee.

Misogynists of the world unite, you have a new leader and his name is Gordon.

And in case you don't immediately recognise your mighty leader, he's the one in the pinny screaming hysterically because there's not enough puff in his pastry.