We Brits are regularly using social channels to find inspiration and show off our cooking accomplishments - with 57% of us saying we eat more adventurously than ever before as a result - either to impress our followers, or as a result of resolving to copy something we've seen on social channels and like the look of. Commissioned by Neff to highlight its search for the next 'Cookaholic' (www.nextcookaholic.co.uk), new research of 2,010 Brits showed that a quarter of us take pictures of our dishes to put on social media when cooking for friends and family and spend six minutes perfecting that all important post (meaning that any hot food will have got cold before the first mouthful is enjoyed).

Lovely as some of these dishes may look, this is highly frustrating for those of us who've been taught that we should wait until everyone is seated and has their food in front of them, before we pick up our cutlery.

Many of us, however, are using these feeds as a source of inspiration... A third of those surveyed say social media has inspired them to create a new dish, so I suppose it cuts both ways...

And how many of us would have thought of cooking in a waterbath, or deliberately seeking out an oven unit incorporating a plate warming drawer, had we not first seen them in use on one of the many cookery programmes to grace our screens? Sadly though, while 'Instagram-able' foods are clogging our newsfeeds, the survey has revealed that many of us are losing our basic cooking skills. Some 37% of Londoners have confessed that they don't know how to cook dry pasta, while 34% of 25-34 year olds don't even know how to boil an egg...

Mmmmm... I have an idea for a new cookery show...

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Yours,

Jan Hobbs