Post by Willow on Sept 7, 2015 16:36:12 GMT 9.5
The scene in magazine-land is peaceful. Friends sitting around a fashionably rustic dining table in the countryside, sharing a feast; our hero the food porn star laughing and handing around platters as he hosts a “relaxed lunch with friends”.
Relaxed? Relaxed for whom? For the friends, perhaps, unless they’re getting up off their arses between pix to wash dishes. But for the hapless cook, expected to prepare nine dishes totalling 97 ingredients without breaking a sweat?
As a working mum, I’m so over food fantasyland, that pretentious sector of society imposing ridiculously unrealistic expectations on modern men and women (but mainly women, who still typically do most of the cooking at home).
Let’s take a vote: do we really need another cookbook selling fast, simple, quick, everyday, dead-easy, do-it-standing-on-your-head-food on the cover, before giving us ingredient lists that take longer to read than we have time to cook dinner? Do we really need yet another rock-star chef showing us how much jolly fun it is to fake three courses on TV? And hands up who else is fed up with foodies telling us how to make our own tacos, mandolin the vegetables, pop down to the farmers markets, source dehydrated cumquats and rustle up a side of pernicious snobbery all before lunch?
The facts are: as a society, we are busier than ever. We are working longer hours, getting less sleep, reporting higher levels of stress, eating more fast food and “home meal solutions” and spending less time in the kitchen than a decade ago. (My grandmother, who had oodles more time to cook than I do and was famous for her scones served as a mid-morning snack before the Sunday roast, would have been highly amused by the degree of difficulty of most “simple” modern recipes).
So I just don’t get it. If, on the one hand, all this nonsense food is just harmless escapism, it seems a rather creepy insight into the zeitgeist: if I want escapism, I’ll read Alice in Wonderland or go and see Wicked, not look at pictures of strangers ramming bruschetta with white anchovies into their mouths.
And if it’s not just escapism — if we are meant to be genuinely educated about food preparation and encouraged to cook by the foodie bourgeoisie, then I have a bone to pick because the only way most nonsense food can be anything but hard, time-devouring work for you, the cook, is if you don’t have a day job, are child-free or have more staff than a 19th-century English aristocrat (in which case, lucky you, and please ask Harriet to hand-stuff my zucchini flowers and pin-bone half a kilo of fish in between tending my bijou kitchen garden and keeping on top of my Instagram feed).
For those of us who are not part of this elite, the biggest problem with the foodie bunch is the ingredient they always leave out: real life.
Yes, it’s such a bugger, isn’t it? Real life takes up so much of my time I often find myself thinking, usually midafternoon when work deadlines are whizzing by, well, what on Earth is for dinner?
I’m lucky. I enjoy cooking — most of the time. I want to eat well, without being silly about it, and I want my husband — a passionate wine guy and equally passionate non-cook — and hyperkinetic four-year-old daughter to eat well, too. Ergo, I accept that cooking — good cooking, anyway — is a commitment, and no amount of weasel preparation times in science fiction recipes will change that. 15 Minute Dinners, Jamie? And who is doing all the prep?
My friend Emily Rose Brott — a twice-published cookbook author — knows a fair bit about real life: she has four children under 14. Real life in extremis, you might say. Em understands that having children at your feet (or elbows) while you’re cooking dinner is the domestic equivalent of the professional chef’s six-month gig with Gordon Ramsay: survive that and you can survive anything. She also gets that there are some nights you are too tired to do anything other than open a can of baked beans (organic, of course), and that’s only after conducting a half-hour search to find the can opener the preschooler has posted in the broom cupboard.
“One time when the children were very young, I started my usual routine of preparing their dinner at 4.30pm in time for the feeding frenzy at 5,” says Em.
“I was planning steak with stir-fry veggies, so I prepped all the veg and lined them up ready for cooking before realising that … yes, I’d forgotten to take the meat out of the freezer that morning.
“That explains why, in our family, when I cook my emergency pantry staple of shakshuka with chickpeas, we like to call it steak and stir-fry veggie surprise. Because as I said to my kids the first time I served it up, ‘Don’t you all just love surprises?’ ”
Here, then, are a few recipes we hope will be useful to anyone more tuned into real life than reality TV. Shakshuka with chickpeas is essentially a Middle Eastern breakfast dish, but breakfast time over there is roughly dinner time here, right? Pumpkin and tahini soup is a robust meal that will satisfy even die-hard carnivores. Moist orange cake is a quick, crowd-pleasing afternoon snack. And stuffed baked barramundi is an adaptation of a Lombardian classic using a beaut bit of Aussie seafood.
Want to see more simple home-cooked food? Check out our archive of David Herbert recipes.
As a general guide, we approach cheffy short-order recipes with caution because they often require a high level of alertness not always achievable for the harried home cook. And we aim for ingredients lists on the concise side (while steering clear of those relying on shortcut products of dubious contents).
Because who the hell is going to do all the cleaning up?
Frightful five
The working parent’s top must-miss recipe instructions
1. Clarify the butter
2. Skin the tomatoes
3. Strain the soup through a sieve
4. Bone the chicken
5. Pipe the icing on to the cupcakes
Et voila!
Our quick and easy recipes — designed to leave you feeling relaxed and free to do another load of washing
• Vichysoisse: Make a potato and leek soup the usual way. Interrupt serving while you take urgent phone call from colleague. Return to soup which has gone cold. Voila! Vichysoisse.
• Crispy-skin duck: Roast a duck, forget about it until 20 minutes too late
• Mummy’s pop-up dinner: Toast.
• Seafood splatter: Prepare a seafood platter. Serve to a three-year-old.
Made me laugh!
Relaxed? Relaxed for whom? For the friends, perhaps, unless they’re getting up off their arses between pix to wash dishes. But for the hapless cook, expected to prepare nine dishes totalling 97 ingredients without breaking a sweat?
As a working mum, I’m so over food fantasyland, that pretentious sector of society imposing ridiculously unrealistic expectations on modern men and women (but mainly women, who still typically do most of the cooking at home).
Let’s take a vote: do we really need another cookbook selling fast, simple, quick, everyday, dead-easy, do-it-standing-on-your-head-food on the cover, before giving us ingredient lists that take longer to read than we have time to cook dinner? Do we really need yet another rock-star chef showing us how much jolly fun it is to fake three courses on TV? And hands up who else is fed up with foodies telling us how to make our own tacos, mandolin the vegetables, pop down to the farmers markets, source dehydrated cumquats and rustle up a side of pernicious snobbery all before lunch?
The facts are: as a society, we are busier than ever. We are working longer hours, getting less sleep, reporting higher levels of stress, eating more fast food and “home meal solutions” and spending less time in the kitchen than a decade ago. (My grandmother, who had oodles more time to cook than I do and was famous for her scones served as a mid-morning snack before the Sunday roast, would have been highly amused by the degree of difficulty of most “simple” modern recipes).
So I just don’t get it. If, on the one hand, all this nonsense food is just harmless escapism, it seems a rather creepy insight into the zeitgeist: if I want escapism, I’ll read Alice in Wonderland or go and see Wicked, not look at pictures of strangers ramming bruschetta with white anchovies into their mouths.
And if it’s not just escapism — if we are meant to be genuinely educated about food preparation and encouraged to cook by the foodie bourgeoisie, then I have a bone to pick because the only way most nonsense food can be anything but hard, time-devouring work for you, the cook, is if you don’t have a day job, are child-free or have more staff than a 19th-century English aristocrat (in which case, lucky you, and please ask Harriet to hand-stuff my zucchini flowers and pin-bone half a kilo of fish in between tending my bijou kitchen garden and keeping on top of my Instagram feed).
For those of us who are not part of this elite, the biggest problem with the foodie bunch is the ingredient they always leave out: real life.
Yes, it’s such a bugger, isn’t it? Real life takes up so much of my time I often find myself thinking, usually midafternoon when work deadlines are whizzing by, well, what on Earth is for dinner?
I’m lucky. I enjoy cooking — most of the time. I want to eat well, without being silly about it, and I want my husband — a passionate wine guy and equally passionate non-cook — and hyperkinetic four-year-old daughter to eat well, too. Ergo, I accept that cooking — good cooking, anyway — is a commitment, and no amount of weasel preparation times in science fiction recipes will change that. 15 Minute Dinners, Jamie? And who is doing all the prep?
My friend Emily Rose Brott — a twice-published cookbook author — knows a fair bit about real life: she has four children under 14. Real life in extremis, you might say. Em understands that having children at your feet (or elbows) while you’re cooking dinner is the domestic equivalent of the professional chef’s six-month gig with Gordon Ramsay: survive that and you can survive anything. She also gets that there are some nights you are too tired to do anything other than open a can of baked beans (organic, of course), and that’s only after conducting a half-hour search to find the can opener the preschooler has posted in the broom cupboard.
“One time when the children were very young, I started my usual routine of preparing their dinner at 4.30pm in time for the feeding frenzy at 5,” says Em.
“I was planning steak with stir-fry veggies, so I prepped all the veg and lined them up ready for cooking before realising that … yes, I’d forgotten to take the meat out of the freezer that morning.
“That explains why, in our family, when I cook my emergency pantry staple of shakshuka with chickpeas, we like to call it steak and stir-fry veggie surprise. Because as I said to my kids the first time I served it up, ‘Don’t you all just love surprises?’ ”
Here, then, are a few recipes we hope will be useful to anyone more tuned into real life than reality TV. Shakshuka with chickpeas is essentially a Middle Eastern breakfast dish, but breakfast time over there is roughly dinner time here, right? Pumpkin and tahini soup is a robust meal that will satisfy even die-hard carnivores. Moist orange cake is a quick, crowd-pleasing afternoon snack. And stuffed baked barramundi is an adaptation of a Lombardian classic using a beaut bit of Aussie seafood.
Want to see more simple home-cooked food? Check out our archive of David Herbert recipes.
As a general guide, we approach cheffy short-order recipes with caution because they often require a high level of alertness not always achievable for the harried home cook. And we aim for ingredients lists on the concise side (while steering clear of those relying on shortcut products of dubious contents).
Because who the hell is going to do all the cleaning up?
Frightful five
The working parent’s top must-miss recipe instructions
1. Clarify the butter
2. Skin the tomatoes
3. Strain the soup through a sieve
4. Bone the chicken
5. Pipe the icing on to the cupcakes
Et voila!
Our quick and easy recipes — designed to leave you feeling relaxed and free to do another load of washing
• Vichysoisse: Make a potato and leek soup the usual way. Interrupt serving while you take urgent phone call from colleague. Return to soup which has gone cold. Voila! Vichysoisse.
• Crispy-skin duck: Roast a duck, forget about it until 20 minutes too late
• Mummy’s pop-up dinner: Toast.
• Seafood splatter: Prepare a seafood platter. Serve to a three-year-old.
Made me laugh!