I was thinking about my cooking skills and wondering why I have been bestowed with such talent, or lack thereof. I cannot remember my mother teaching me how to cook anything. Thinking about my childhood and the meals mum use to cook for the family made me realise something — I definitely got my cooking skills from my mother: repetitive, bland and boring.
I remember we ate a lot of lamb loin chops, mashed potato and peas. Mum didn’t care if the chops were medium rare or the fat was rendered properly, she’d cook the hell out of them. It’s probably the reason why I’m in no way fond of eating chops of any description nowadays.
Another strong food memory from my childhood was Mum’s stews. They were full of chuck steak and vegetables and they always tasted the same. Oh how I hated them! Mum would throw everything in a huge pot and boil the bejesus out of it.
Leftovers were in abundance and always put into Tupperware containers in the fridge. Overnight, the leftover stew would develop a thick coating that required a jackhammer to remove it. The following night, Mum would drop it all in a pot and boil it again, stir it for about 30 minutes to dissolve the jelly stuff and serve it on toast. Back then you ate whatever was put in front of you or it was off to bed with an empty belly. As an adult, I have never eaten anything that resembled the stews of my childhood.
However, I do remember the beautiful smell of Friday night dinners. I would be sitting on the swings with hot fish and chips on my lap, waiting for Dad to come out of the pub. Dinner was always lukewarm by the time he appeared and had to be reheated when we got home. To this day, I will never understand why he always bought the fish and chips before he went to the pub, and why he always claimed he was only having one beer. Obviously math was not his strong point.
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