Food

For some people like myself the ability to create beautiful food gives unmeasurable satisfaction. I’m a very long way from a professional chef however I do consider that anyone can create many great dishes from basic ingredients with little skill. I have a saying that goes “If you can read, you can cook” and when ever I am complimented on a dish I always acknowledge the amazing chef that has provided me with the recipe.

I was unlike many people that have left home with some fabulous family recipes and generations of cooking traditions. I grew up with a hot family meal each evening and it was most often meat and three veg. The meat and vegetables were always cooked until well done, and I mean well done! The beans were grey and the potato was often flavoured by the pot that they had been boiled dry in. Our meat was usually mutton or boiled mince. Mum had mastered the art of pushing enough wood into the combustion stove to roast a leg of mutton while she went off to church. In fact this long slow cook probably provided an advantage to the old piece of mutton. On her return home the roast vegetables would be cooked in the mutton fat which she drained into the electric frying pan.

There was a special meal that dad would cook. He called it Chinese fashion and it was basically boiled mince and cabbage, The pot would stay on the edge of the stove and an additional cup of rice and water would be added to make it go a further meal. Chinese fashion was something that a lot of the old Emmaville mining families would cook. Possbly a dish they had learnt to make from the Chinese miners that lived in the area.

Our biscuits were always from a packet and if we had guests for aftenoon tea Mum would go all out and make Saos with cheese and tomato. In her later life she found a caterers sponge mix and made her siganture sponge by the dozens, They were filled with mock cream and therefore our fridge always full of margarine on the ready for the next batch of sponges. I would never be able to guess how many of the sponges she actually made and delivered all over the country side.

Cooking and distraction do not go well together so I find that being mindfull and immersing myself in the process of cooking is therapeutic. Home cooking has many other benifits too. It is an art, its nutricious, ecomomic and a life skill. It is versitile and available 24 X 7.