I was helping younger son’s girlfriend with a project the other day when she happened to mention my lads had been airing their grievances about my cooking. Naturally I was interested to know what my shortcomings were.
Most of the time they were growing up, I was writing food columns for one newspaper or another. Then around the time they both left home in the late 90s, I started writing what these days is called a food blog – Kiwi Kitchen.
My food writing has mainly been recipe-driven and The Spouse and sons have been my de facto test kitchen tasting panel. I’d have thought that would have been a pretty cruisy job. In fact I often envied them all coming home wondering what would be on the table that night. It was never a mystery to me because no one else volunteered to share the cooking.
My first cookbook, Home Science Recipes, full of typical 50s Kiwi fare like pies, milk puddings, mince, fritters, fish cakes, offal, roasts and stews.
Sometimes The Spouse and I have reminisced on the predictability of our own childhood meals. There were Sunday roasts, followed by the left-overs on Monday – cottage pie in the winter, cold meat and salad in the summer. Lamb chops, fish pie, curried sausages, savoury mince, meatloaf, corned beef, bacon and egg pie, Cornish pasties, steak and kidney, Irish stew, oxtail stew, ham. Home cooks in those days usually had a dozen or so core dishes on rotation, depending on the season. And there were light meals like spaghetti on toast, Welsh rarebit, lemon pancakes or soup for Sunday nights.
I know my kids would sometimes enquire what was for dinner, adding quickly “chicken or fish?” But I thought they had plenty of variety in their food. We worked our way through various ethnic cuisines – Greek, Italian, Middle Eastern, Indian, French, Mexican, you name it. Wonderful stuff I’d never even heard of when I was a child. And we tried less familiar vegetables – though mostly with a low success rate.
So what had I been doing wrong? Apart from eggplant, pumpkin, Brussels sprouts and the occasional other “disgusting” offering, the sons hoovered up just about anything put in front of them. And they were allowed takeaways on a Friday night – the one night I refused to cook. I thought I was a model mother.
Well, it appears the problem with my cooking was that I would produce some really great dish that everyone enjoyed – but I’d never make it again. It would vanish without trace. No predictable “it’s Wednesday so it’s bangers and mash night” in our house.
I suspect the abandoned dishes were probably ones where I decided there was too much faffing around involved in getting them on the table.
I don't like frying but I do like schnitzel
And then there were those meals everyone loved, but I hated cooking. Wiener schnitzel was one. They loved it so much, I would have to make a lot. All that flouring and egging and breadcrumbing. And then the frying. I don’t like frying at the best of times and making schnitzel for three ravenous chaps involved a lot of it. The only reason I conceded and made it occasionally was I happen to like it myself. Purely selfish.
Cooking has been a voyage of discovery for me since cooking classes at primary school. Anyone who has been in my study usually notices the wall of books comprises mainly cookbooks. I’ve been collecting them since I got my first pay envelope and I am always attaching stickers to recipes I want to try. And I have to experiment with ingredients and come up with recipes of my own.
Occasionally I make a dish that ticks all the boxes and it becomes a keeper. One of the good things about having a food website is I can post those recipes there and find them easily when I want to make them again. It might be a year before I do, but I know where to find them.
Of course, I make the old standbys – pan-fried fish and salad, winter casseroles, quick pasta meals, fish pie, comfort food and the like. Dishes I could make blindfolded. They’re the ones I fall back on when I’ve spent an hour looking through cookbooks for inspiration and run out of time or lack the right ingredients to do anything ambitious.
I was discussing the sons’ complaint with The Spouse. He reminded me about those times when I was away and he was left to wear the apron. The kids loved it. I would come home to tales of wonderful meals – lamb chops and “yummy” frozen peas, bangers and mash, hamburgers, spaghetti bolognaise. Maybe a carrot or two along the way, but no Brussels sprouts or eggplant.
“Dad made good dinners,” they’d say wistfully – for weeks afterwards.
I wish he’d make one for me…
