The Book

This is an extract from the intro of my book, “Cheat Cooking for Bachelors, Bikies and Chicks who SAY they can’t Cook – a Seriously Easy Journey through modern Aussie-Indian Cuisine”.. long title, short book. It’s self-explanatory…

Food is fuel. This we all know. But it can be much, much more than that. Food feeds the body and the brain. It also feeds the senses. This book is about starting to get some self-satisfaction from preparing dishes that you can be proud of. It’s about impressing others with what appear to be great efforts in culinary art, but in reality are short-cuts to the finished product. A short-cut to the senses.I learned to cook in self-defence. When I was eleven years old, my young brain registered that my dear old Mum couldn’t cook for nuts. A usual dinner amounted to a can of mutton stew on dry toast. Mum had an old pressure cooker, so, on special occasions, we would be graced with an overdone (pressure steamed) hogget chop and seriously wrecked vegetables – all cooked at once in the pressure cooker.

I kid you not!

It wasn’t that Mum didn’t care, or that she was lazy: she just didn’t know any better. As a survivor of the Great Depression, an absence of quality was a given. That’s what they needed back then to simply survive, and she brought that sensibility forward. Food equals fuel. That’s all. Over and out.

But Mum and Dad had a circle of friends who were Indian and Anglo-Indian folk. Every Saturday night, they would have a sort of “round-robin” feast, with all families bringing an Indian dish to bog into. I recall a few of those friends winking at me or giving me sympathetic looks. Even at that early age, I knew that their concern for me was all about Mum’s hash of mutton mince meat with a half a can of Keen’s Curry Powder sprinkled over the top.

Anyway. I decided to take the bull by the horns and ask Mrs Riggs – one of the “senior” Indian cooks – if she would teach me to throw together some easy Indian dishes. Her answer was, “No, not easy! But I’ll teach you to make curries and other Indian fare properly.” Her other comment was that we should do this after school when my Mum would not discover this disloyal scheme!

So, that was the start of a life of cooking and a passion for good and wholesome food, most of which comes from the regional cooking of the Asian sub-continent (India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and S-E Asia.

But, I’m an essentially lazy bloke. Not lazy enough to accept anything at all, but lazy enough to seek out ways and means to short-cut the tedious tasks in cooking preparation without allowing the short-cut to show in the finished product.

Does this impress the chicks? You betcha! It impresses the Hell out of my lovely wife, Annette, and did when I first met her.

Being essentially lazy, I have sought out “already available” preparations to make the job easier. Forty or so years of doing that came to very little until the last few years when pastes and preparations improved in quality and ease of use. Recently, there have entered into the market quite a few extra-good pastes and preparations. Some of them are sensational, especially given that they make the task of cooking a top quality meal SERIOUSLY EASY!

Don’t get me wrong. I also love to cook curries and other dishes from pure scratch: – you know, dry roast spices, mix them with the proper herbs, grind them with the mortar and pestle, fry them in exactly the right oil and THEN start cooking the dish. But when that’s already been done for you – and done well, then why bother?

READING

Many people are not “really big” on reading introductions, and I’m one of those people. So if you’ve got this far, good on you! You’ve done well. But the whole point of this gig is to have you discover ways of cutting time and effort in cooking, and making otherwise complicated recipes seriously EASY.

So PLEASE spend the time to go through the start-off hints and directions here. I promise you that in the long run, it will make your cooking easier and even more fun. At least you will get more satisfaction out of your finished dishes, and actually understand more about what has become a good part of what we can call modern Australian cuisine. Hey, given that you’re trying to impress, remember this: – knowledge is sexy!

YOUR AIM

Throughout this book, I make reference to “impressing the chicks,” or if you prefer, “impressing the ladies.” That might be one of the aims. As a matter of fact and a matter of humour, perhaps you can read subtle little hints from time to time that this may be an instruction booklet on “how to move from bench to bed.” I make no apology for that. I’m just joking. But you never know. Food knowledge can be incredibly sexy to some people.

So, more than anything I hope this might introduce you to the satisfaction and joy of being able to create great dishes with little experience. As I chatted more and more about the idea of creating these hampers and the booklet, people commented just how useful it might be to those who are NOT bachelors, bikies or chicks who say they can’t cook. They meant young blokes just leaving home to make it on their own, young girls in the same situation, youngsters turning 21, and the list goes on. So, this is for everyone. The aim is to cook well for a start.

THE RECIPES

“Cheat” Dishes

These dishes – mostly curries or similar – employ the fantastic short-cuts of modern pastes and pre-prepared concoctions found in almost all spice shops. Together we look at these preparations and why I recommend them, as well as talking about the ease with which they can be “tickled up” to have them appear more authentic, and as though you had gone to great lengths to do all the things that the pastes have done for you. And no-one needs to know you’ve cheated!

Side-dishes

The few recipes that follow the cheat recipes ALL complement the main dishes. They don’t use already prepared pastes, as do the cheat dishes.

But these “start-from-scratch” side-dishes here are all quite simple: –simple enough for this lazy cook/author, so, simple enough for you bachelors and bikies (and others).

That said, simple dishes can become somewhat exquisite if you follow certain simple rules about the preparation of ingredients and presentation of the finished dish.

CURRIES

“Curry” or Kari is the Indian word for gravy. Most curries are better eaten the day after cooking, so they are popular here with us because, if you want to, they can be prepared and cooked at your leisure and re-heated just before serving. They can then be garnished and presented perfectly in the knowledge that the dish is fine (you’ve already taste-tested it) and washed up after main cooking. So, curries are a boon for the bachelor out to win a heart.