I love cooking and have done for as long as I can remember. I really can’t understand people who don’t like to cook but the desire of many to spend less time in the kitchen is what fuels the massive take away and prepared meal industries. And yet there seems to be a bad fast-food story on the news almost every week. We hear about the dangers of fatty takeaway, the preservatives in heavily processed products, the sugar in soft drinks and the obesity problem with children who don’t do enough exercise. Surely if people can learn the skills and the develop a passion for cooking they will be better placed to make healthy choices, cook meals from scratch with fresh produce and set positive examples for their children for the future?
I recently began to think about why it is that I love cooking. Is it actually because I wanted to provide healthy food with quality ingredients? Is it because I like to spoil my family with home cooked treats? No, its more to do with fun really. Although, as I mentioned before, fresh and healthy and home cooked is good!
I think the real reason I love to cook is because my mother loved to cook and created an exciting and wonderful environment for me so that I could learn too. Don’t get me wrong, our kitchen was no fairyland. I grew up in a two bedroom fibro house in the suburbs of Sydney and our kitchen was not big enough to swing a cat. We had the left hand side of the stainless steel sink and a small part of a bench top to work on and we had to wash up as we went because there was just no space! But mum made it into an adventure for me.
What were the ingredients for this adventure?
- She particularly loved to bake and had a fantastic assortment of cake tins and trays and she kept the biscuit cupboard full of tasty biscuits and slices for our eating pleasure. We also had a fantastic assortment of spices and herbs.
- She also had a treasure trove of recipes that she had gleaned from her mother, newspaper articles, radio programs and magazines. She was always copying out recipes from magazines in the doctor’s waiting room (most people just tore them out but my mother always did the right thing).
And
- SHE LET ME HELP HER!
In other words, we did it together. That’s the key.
My earliest memories of being with mum in the kitchen were standing on a small chair so that I could be next to her at the sink when she was baking. I had some tiny toy ‘shopping’ consisting of cans and plastic packets of flour and sugar and I would get them out of the cupboard to get ready for cooking. She then opened the salt box and I ‘mixed’ the salt with a small wooden spoon to mix up by ‘biscuits’ or ‘cake’.
When I was older I graduated to mixing in the eggs once the butter and sugar was creamed and then came the day that I got to use the Sunbeam Mix Master myself. I still remember the excitement and fear as I held the spatula at the side of bowl to keep everything moving as it should. There was no stopping me after that.
I soon found myself poring over her recipe books, adding recipes in myself and being constantly on the lookout for more exciting things to cook. Of course baking was only one aspect of cooking. We also explored all sorts of recipes for meals and snacks over the years. Our recipes became more interesting during the 70s as the variety of fruits and veg and cuts of meat and chicken became available.
When I left home she bought me my own recipe book and put lots of our favourites in it. She even managed to write down the steps for all those recipes that were in her head!
My mum died a few years ago and I have her precious recipe books now. The pages are marked, worn thin and torn in places and the cover stained and marked from water and spills over the year. Looking through the books triggers all sorts of happy memories because cooking with mum was such an important part of my childhood.
But of course our lives have changed so much and the way we do our shopping and prepare food has changed for most people. Even the way we find and record our recipes is different. I don’t know what I would do without my Google recipe folder!
Sometimes I wonder if anyone takes the time, like my mum did, to go back to basics and open the exciting world of cooking for their children? I have to admit that I didn’t do enough of it for my children. I was so busy when they were young that I did the cooking on the run. And so some of the joy was lost for a while. I even started buying premixed sauces and cake mixes and threw away many of my basic recipes.
But I found my love for cooking again about six years ago when I was given a Thermomix. You’ve probably heard lots of Thermomix stories – some good and some disastrous! But what it did for me was take me back to basics and bring back the fun. If you read our ‘About Us’ page you will know that Andrew and I trained as Food Scientists so everything about food is exciting to us. We learned that a friend working for a starch company was using the Thermomix in the R&D laboratory to mimic the shearing of the starch that occurs in commercial processes. To us that was exciting and we wanted to put the machine to the test in our own kitchen. Did you know that a Thermomix can grind dry chick peas into flour in a few seconds?
So I had once again found the excitement of cooking- the machine and the shared interest to learn how this machine would spice up our culinary lives!
But lets go back to the beginning – I said that I love cooking and you can love it too! That might seem like a bold statement because I don’t know you. But if you have just read this post, hopefully you will realise that the joy of cooking comes from the journey, who you share it with and why that journey is important! It’s not about what you are cooking or how much time you have. So I suggest you invite a friend or a family member into the kitchen, clear out all that precooked stuff, go shopping for fresh ingredients and get started on the exciting journey that is cooking.
I would love to help you on that journey. I would like my mother’s love of cooking to live on and so I will be sharing some of her favourites on this blog page. Over the years I have adapted many of these recipes for the Thermomix too so I will share these adaptations too. If your recipe book looks like the one in the picture below, why don’t we work on filling it together? Why not check out some of our recipe blog posts and start cooking today?
I have lots of recipes to share so keep looking if you don’t find anything that takes your fancy right now.
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Until next time,
Gillian (and Andrew)
