If you view cooking as a chore, it’s then an easily sacrificed thing,” says Mike Huttlestone, one of the four friends behind SORTEDfood, the YouTube cooking channel that is currently racking up 11m views per month (bit.ly/SORTEDfood).

Teachers know this more than most. When you’re working an average 54-hour week and trying to squeeze in all of life’s other obligations, cooking can often become a chore. Cutting, slicing, dicing, washing, blending, weighing - just preparing the meal can feel impossible, never mind cooking it. And if you have a household full of kids all with different dietary requirements, too, is it any surprise the easier options become more tempting? Cooking is so often sacrificed in favour of quick-win, usually microwaved, options, or worse-for-the-wallet choices like a takeaway.

And this sacrifice can lead to an unhealthier diet. Around 81 per cent of teachers in our survey said the profession had negatively impacted their ability to eat healthily.

Huttlestone says ditching cooking can also impact your state of mind, as you are turning your back on a fantastic wellbeing tool. He says: “It’s so brilliant for getting headspace and it’s quite therapeutic.”

You may think this all very well for a professional chef to point out - the reality of being an amateur cook is that everything takes about four times as long than it says it should in the latest recipe book. But this is where Huttlestone and his co-founders - Ben Ebbrell, Barry Taylor and Jamie Spafford (pictured) - are different: they aren’t professional chefs (only Ebbrell has any culinary training).

Instead, they are four friends who started trading recipes via beer mats to improve their eating habits and ended up setting up and running a very successful YouTube channel showing people how to cook those recipes. They’re amateurs, just like you, and their pragmatic approach to cookery and lack of formal training has seemingly been a bonus: millions of people around the world now tune into their bi-weekly programme because the cooking creed they espouse is so accessible.

People are scared of getting it wrong or scared of it being costly if it does go wrong

“There’s this huge expanse of lack of knowledge,” says Ebbrell. “The knowledge is one thing, but it’s more about the confidence. People are scared of getting it wrong or scared of it being costly if it does go wrong and they have to go and buy dinner as well if they muck it up,” he says.

What the SORTEDfood founders prove is that amateurs can do it, and that they can have fun doing it, too.

That there was a gap for such an offering was initially a surprise: “[People] were coming to us [for cooking advice], which was quite scary─ to come to four idiots on the internet to know how to cook,” says Spafford.

They have grown into the role, though. SORTEDfood’s latest project is a free online course called Now Cook It (nowcookit.co.uk), developed in collaboration with Co-op.

But many teachers would point out that having the knowledge and confidence to cook is the least of their worries: more pressing problems are workload, tiredness and lack of time.

This is something that the SORTEDfood boys do appreciate. “I imagine teachers can be marking all evening until they need to sleep, not until they’ve finished, and then the remainder goes onto the pile for the next day,” says Huttlestone. “It’s feeling like: I get up early, I have a full day and then my work doesn’t finish there. I drive home, the work continues; if I can get dinner at some point or microwave a bit of a meal, then great.”

Plan your meals

Having set up their own business and worked all the hours to get it established, they know these routines well. And the good news for teachers is that they also know the best ways for amateurs to get around the problems.

The first step is forward planning. By thinking about what you want to eat and buying in advance, you are more in control and can avoid that last-minute pre-dinner panic.

“If you get to the evening and you’re having to invent a dish off of the back of the ingredients you’ve got, then it’s too late,” says Huttlestone. “And that’s where there’s temptation to go an easier route, whatever that may be.”

It’s about making life easier and avoiding putting your tired brain to the trouble of making decisions during the week when it will inevitably take whichever option is easiest. It also forces you to cook by giving you a moral imperative to do so.

“I find that as soon as I commit to buying the food and I’ve got it in the fridge, I know that’s my schedule for the week and what I’ve got to do, otherwise the food goes off and I waste it,” says Taylor.

To scaffold your week’s eating even more, the four suggest buying the same set of ingredients each week, from which you know how to make at least five different dishes. Then, to add variety, make sure that you have a selection of staples (such as herbs and spices) in the cupboard that you can use to mix up the dishes and add a new slant to them.

Huttlestone gives the example of a chicken breast and vegetables, which can be transformed into different dishes from one week to the next by adding a couple of extra ingredients from the fridge or store cupboard.

“You think, ‘Oh I can’t bear to have chicken and peas and broccoli.’ Whereas, actually, if you butterfly the chicken, you could put some mozzarella in the middle, and then make a tomato sauce [to go on top]. Little things like that are really easy to do once you’re aware of the ways that you can mix things up,” he says.

Another easy way to make mid-week meals less stressful, they say, is to make your own “ready meals” by cooking a large batch of something healthy, like a stew or a chili con carne, which can then be stored in the fridge or freezer and reheated.

“You know what’s gone into it and you can make it different depending on how you feel that night. Just chucking chili on a load of nachos with some cheese and sour cream makes a different dish to what you did last week by putting it over a jacket potato,” says Spafford, who also suggests looking for dishes, such as one-pot casseroles, that require minimal preparation time and then can sit in the oven while you get on with your planning.

“[With some meals] you actually only need five minutes of you doing stuff to it at the beginning to get it ready and five minutes at the end to finish it off. But in between it’s doing its own thing, which allows you to go off and do your own thing as well,” he says.

But it should not just be about quick fixes, they say: sometimes all those other commitments you have can be made more manageable, not less, by dedicating some time to cooking.

Take time away from the books

As Huttlestone said earlier, it can improve your wellbeing by giving you time away from the books, the worries, the stress and focusing on something else. That can mean when you return to the books, you are in a better state of mind to do the work quicker and to a higher standard.

Taking the time will also have knock-on effects to your health, they claim. If you can spend half an hour in the kitchen, they stress that this is the best way to take control of your diet and make sure that you are making healthy choices about what you and your family eat.

Ebbrell explains that in cooking things yourself, you get a better idea of what is going into a product and can therefore moderate your eating accordingly. With the quick-win solutions, he says, you don’t get that insight.

It’s a problem when you can pick up a bag of chips on the way home from work or school every day

“It’s a problem when you can pick up a bag of chips on the way home from work or school every day as you lose sight of moderation,” he says.

“If you’re planning something at the weekend, you can see that although you might have a salad on Monday, you’re going to counteract that on Tuesday by having fried chicken. You can look at the balance,” adds Spafford.

The four stress that healthy eating is not just about picking the unpalatable option and banishing your favourite foods. In fact, cooking things you love to eat is at the heart of the SORTEDfood philosophy. This is where the excitement comes, the desire to experiment and the urge to do it again. It’s what makes cooking “fun and easy”, says Huttlestone.

Reaching a point where cooking feels enjoyable might require a change in attitude for many teachers. But the four think that the answer to eating better is ultimately very simple indeed: stop making it harder than it actually is.

“There are so many options out there to try to take away the pain of cooking,” Spafford says. “[In reality], it doesn’t take long at all, you don’t need to make a fuss about it, and the benefits of actually cooking rather than getting a takeaway are so massive.”

Helen Amass is deputy features editor for Tes and a former teacher. She tweets @Helen_Amass