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Excerpts
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Now chefs are in our lounge-rooms. Domestic gods and goddesses, they are passionate, flamboyant and even naked. (Imagine our disappointment on discovering that this was not literally the case.) Their job is to demystify the secrets of the kitchen. "It's
easy," they say, "You can do it too!" S:
What's a courgette? M:
It says here to use shiitake mushrooms. We
tussled with the equipment. S:
Do you have a blowtorch? We spent eight hours (not including smokos) creating dinner for four adults and four children. The kids turned up their noses at our oh-so-carefully-piled towers of food, and ended up eating potato chips in the living room. The men picked off the artfully arranged snow pea sprouts, sniffed suspiciously at the gently wilted bok choy, and ate the meat. "Bloody good steak," was their pronouncement. Everyone liked dessert though: Sara Lee chocolate cake from the freezer. There had been a small incident involving a toddler needing the toilet, the crème brûlée and several flammable kitchen items. Spending an entire afternoon twisting tortellini and stirring sorbet is all very well and good for the occasional swanky dinner party, but where are the recipes for the general home cook who just wants to receive a small pat on the back for providing tasty nourishment for family and friends? Recipes that can be made with a minimum of fuss and when served under a dim light can pass for real cuisine. The kind that can be dished up to both your sister's arty new boyfriend and Great Aunty Mildred, without offending the delicate sensibilities of either. Recipes that can be made while you are ill with the flu, haven't shopped for a week and have a toddler or two clinging to your legs. The focus of mealtimes and entertaining should be shifted from the food that we are eating to the people with whom we are sharing our meal. The heart of a dinner party is not the dinner, but the party. The food should be a trigger to conversation (hopefully not about how awful it is). It should taste good and be simple to prepare, freeing you to relax and enjoy your meal and your company. You need a collection of recipes that you are so familiar with that you can't go wrong. If you typically spend a week in preparation when you entertain and it takes you a week to recover, then you're taking things way too seriously. M:
It often takes me at least a few days to recover when I've been
entertaining. This doesn't only apply when you are cooking for visitors, but also for everyday family dining. Who wants to endure a stressful session in the kitchen at the end of a busy day only to have the gourmet fare your efforts produce go largely unnoticed by your partner and/or children? This lack of appreciation could push you over the edge if your day has been a bad one. As tempting as it may be to pour a carefully prepared dish of wild mushroom ragout into the lap of an unappreciative husband, it is far better to use one of our simple recipes. You'll still have the satisfaction of giving him what he deserves, but it will have only taken you twenty minutes to put together before wasting it. Then we suggest you help yourself to a large glass of the vodka slush in chapter 14.
It's worth noting here that we have no formal qualifications in the fields of food preparation or nutrition. We are not dietitians, chefs or nutritionists. We are, however, two women with extensive experience in preparing meals for tired, hungry husbands and grumpy, picky children. Over the years we have fine-tuned the art of throwing together food for family get-togethers while simultaneously dressing children, cleaning the house, dealing with phone calls from telemarketers and preventing our husbands from starting that 'half-hour fix-it job' they have been putting off for months but have suddenly decided needs to be done immediately. We work on strict budgets and with whatever can be obtained in a five minute hit-and-run visit to the supermarket. You won't find any recipes in here that require the economy of a small nation to afford. Nor will you have to go foraging in the wilds to source the ingredients. Leave that to the Bush-tucker Man and use the time you save to whip yourself up an extra aperitif. We have personally cooked (almost) every recipe included in this book. We have experimented on our families and friends. We've even forced food upon neighbours and complete strangers in the street once our families rebelled from their role as culinary guinea pigs. We take no responsibility for the haggis or herring salad. Throughout this book we will share many stories with you. Most of these come from our personal experience. Others come from the experiences of friends and family. Of course, mixed in with all these are the urban myths. The ones that you just know can't possibly be true, but you'd like to think that they did actually happen to someone, somewhere. We'll leave it up to you to work out which is which. Feel free to pass these anecdotes off as your own. We have, of course, changed the names of people involved to protect the innocent, namely us. Once you've read some of the stories, you'll understand. Some people have no sense of humour about their faults and failures being shared with total strangers.
A
Can of This, a Jar of That
M:
I like to pour myself a glass of wine while I cook. In fact I have
been known to 'put dinner on' at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and
polish the rest of the bottle off while getting ready for the party.
Who wants to be slaving over the stove when the guests arrive, when
you could be dancing around the lounge room in your pantyhose singing
Cold Chisel into a hairbrush?
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Chefs
of old were cloistered in their kitchens, set apart from the filthy
masses by their pristine white jackets and toques. Rumoured to be
possessed of both divine gifts and earthly tempers, they were admired
and feared. Behind swinging doors they created the mysteries of
cuisine. A procession of waiters solemnly brought forth quivering
towers of melt-in-the-mouth food to be oohed and ahed over by devotees.
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Meredith Flynn