I’m not sure why I never took up cooking. It’s not as though I have been fed tasty morsels each night by talented chefs and waited on hand and foot by nymphs.
Until the age of 22, most of my meals were cooked by my dear old mum. She has many wonderful qualities, but conjuring up high class cuisine is not one of them. As the old saying goes, she could burn tea and is the only person I know who could make curry taste like apple tart and vice versa.
And yet I never took the logical step of taking up the pots and pans and doing it myself. I had three sisters but that wasn’t much help. In Irish culture, you have to be in your seventies before spinster sisters will cook for bachelor brothers.
When I left home I moved in to a flat with two mates. One of them lived on nothing but sausages for the first year, while the other thought that yogurt and bananas provided all the necessary food groups and give you all your daily requirements.
It wasn’t haute cuisine, but by then I was living in London and was surrounded by thousands of Indian, Italians and Lebanese who would happily cook for me for a small price. Thus began a life long love affair with take-away food.
Then there was the lost years when I questioned whether I was up to it or not. Would my chicken give you (or more importantly me) botulism? Would my pies implode, my trifles disintegrate into a thousand constituent parts, my sausages take on the consistency of soup and my curry, through some genetic curse, taste like apple-tart?
I lost what little confidence I had and stopped completely. Even old staples, such as my world famous garlic bread and scrambled eggs went by the way-side. I sold my soul and stomach to the consumerist, disposable age and happily let it feed me a cocktail of salt and sugar fuelled stodge.
I decided all this had to change and searched my conscience for motivation. Some people are motivated by dreams of glory, financial reward or sheer competitive drive. For me, only shame will work. It is only when I’m exposed to a mocking world that I can rouse myself from years of slumber.
Australia provides such a mocking world. St. Kilda beach is packed with bronzed Adonis’ while the roads of the city are filled each night with joggers, cyclists, roller bladders and various other forms of healthy transport.
And then there are the public displays of cooking. Every weekend the parks, beaches and balconies of Melbourne hum to the beat of a million singing BBQ chefs. Even more gallingly, most of the chefs are men. It’s a right of passage thing here that blokes have to be able to cook a steak, some fish and two fried eggs on a barby before they can graduate from primary school.
My shame being complete, I finally found the motivation to change. It helps when you have a girlfriend who is not only a master chef, but is also someone with great patience and a low fear of being poisoned. She volunteered to teach and supervise me, perhaps not realising that the task she was about to undertake was akin to Robinson Crusoe teaching Latin to Man Friday.
We started with a pasta sauce which was a delicate mix of roasted tomatoes, red wine vinegar and olive oil. It was damn tasty, but I think the thing that most impressed me was that this was the first time I’d ever made something that looked completely different when it was finished to what it looked like when I started.
I’d managed to go all these years eating tomato based sauce and never thought to think how it got to that state from a fully formed fruit.
But a pasta sauce is a pasta sauce after all, so this week I thought I’d branch out into something more substantial. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have had a long and often beautiful relationship with curry. It’s been tough love at times. My stomach hasn’t always thanked me for pouring 3 curries into it on weekend trips to London. I was a connoisseur of Chicken Tikka Masala when it was still trendy and hadn’t overtaken fish and chips as England’s favourite dish. But my curry fetish wasn’t monogamous. I liked up Thai Green Curry and queued for hours in the rain to get a Vietnamese curry chip in Dundalk after every visit to the pub in the 1980’s.
So I consider myself an expert on spicy Asian foods. I know my Szechwan’s from my Nepalese and Rogan Josh’s from my Bombay Aloo’s. But my expertise falls heavily on the eating side of things so it was a daunting task that faced me as I arranged the ingredients neatly on the sideboard.
Eggplant curry was my challenge. I haven’t branched into chicken or beef yet. But this is not because of any vegetarian bent. I had toyed with the idea of becoming a fully signed up tree hugging vegi. But I looked to God for guidance and one night over a juicy steak he came to me and said “If I wanted you be vegetarian, I wouldn’t have made animals out of meat”. I’m still a bit scared of cooking that stuff to be honest.
The eggplants needed to be roasted first. And I thought ovens were only for heating up pizzas! While you’re doing this, you chop up your veggies and get your spices ready. I went heavy on the cumin and ground coriander and light on the chilli powder. Chilli is such a cop out for curry chefs and I wasn’t going to fall into that trap first time up. Fry your onions until your kitchen smells like an Irish chipper, then peel and mash the eggplant and lamp the whole lot into a pot, spices, vegetables and all and cook for ten minutes.
And surprise, surprise, out comes something that is not only edible but bloody tasty to boot. I don’t think I’ll ever be Jamie Oliver (I don’t have the hair) but I really could get into this.
And the best part of it all was, it didn’t taste anything like Apple Tart.
No comments:
Post a Comment