Trust me, there’s no cook like a lazy cook who has a hankering for flavour!
I actually grew up not that fussed about food. Dad was Italian, Mum is English and the two could not be further apart in their approaches to food!
Let’s see now. Dad was born in 1939, just before WWII broke out, in a little village in Sicily. Despite living on a ‘farm’, food was scarce at times. His father was considered the local slaughterman. If anyone had an animal to slaughter, they’d call him and his payment was whatever parts of the beast the family would spare. Pigs’ trotters and ears, chicken feet, organ meat, it was all gratefully accepted and brought home for my Nonna to cook. ‘Til the day he died, my father relished nose-to-tail eating, even though it was never a funky trend like it is today.
Many times I came home from school to find a pig’s head in the kitchen sink.
Oh right, salami day. Or the house filling with the pungent aromas of baby octopus swimming in the strongest garlic sauce you could imagine. Dad did love his weekend market shopping and cooking.
Mum, on the other hand, was born in 1937 and raised in industrial Birmingham, England, where fish and chips was standard fare and everything was fried to within an inch of its life. Actually, my mother would never eat fish. For her, it was ‘egg and chips’, good old homemade chips, hand-cut from peeled potatoes and fried in dripping. Once the chips were removed from the grease, the eggs would go in. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried an egg fried in meat drippings!
When my parents met at a dance in Australia, there was no knowing how the two cultures would collide in the kitchen. While courting, Mum would visit Dad’s parents’ house and be served up all kinds of Italian goodies like spaghetti with rich meat sauce, chicken soup with ravioli, homemade pizza smothered in parmesan cheese and olive oil, and the occasional arancini on festive occasions.
Fast forward to the honeymoon and my parents set off from Brisbane to Sydney, driving down the east coast towing a tiny caravan. And in that caravan was a little stove and a big, fat pasta pot! Yes, on her honeymoon, my mother was introduced to how to cook good, hearty pasta sauce.
Growing up, the menu was a confusing mish-mash of dishes, but mostly Italian.
Even though Mum was English, we were pretty much raised Italian. The regular repertoire definitely included regular spaghetti with sauce (sometimes made with minced meat, sometimes with other cuts, sometimes with potatoes and peas, sometimes with fried eggs a la shakshuka). Also on regular rotation were chicken soup with pastina (small pasta), pasta al forno (pasta bake), pasta with garlic sauce, and crumbed chicken, steak or fish with salad.
When the menu flipped to the ‘Pommy’ side, Mum would do a roast with a side of over-cooked, unappealing vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, peas) and gravy, shepherd’s pie, corned beef hash, steak and veg, and of course, egg and chips, which would be served with buttered, white, sliced bread, tomato sauce and cups of tea.
To be honest, it seemed Mum’s cooking was better when she went Italian. You could cook the living daylights out of soup and sauce and it would be even richer and more flavoursome. But her prowess with vegies was not so impressive. Ever had cauliflower and broccoli boiled to smithereens in the same pot?
We also had lots of barbecues as Dad enjoyed cooking, especially when he could indulge his primal side and stand by the barbie gnawing meat off the bone. There too, the garlic sauce made an appearance. A concoction of tinned tomatoes, lots of garlic, some salt, pepper and basil plus a good lick of olive oil, it was slathered over the meat with a long sprig of rosemary from the garden. Visitors, especially non-Italians adored it and went home breathing garlic fire for the next twenty-four hours. Dad’s garlic sauce wasn’t just for meat or baby octopus. It was the standby on a Sunday night when we’d had a busy weekend and no time to prepare a full-on meal. Just boil up a pot of pasta and spoon over the garlic sauce. No need to heat it. Tossing it through the hot pasta would do fine. (One of my earliest introductions to lazy cooking!)
As a kid, food didn’t interest me that much … unless it was biscuits, lollies or ice cream.
I can’t tell you how many times I was left sitting at the dinner table until bedtime because I wouldn’t finish my dinner. Only years later, as an adult, I developed an appreciation for my Mum’s pasta sauce and chicken soup and today, I wish I could have either, just once more. But Mum has long since put away the wooden spoon and no matter how I try, mine never tastes like hers. Still fantastic, I’ll boast, but just not the same as hers.
Now, as lazy cooking goes, I could say I picked up quite a few tips from my parents. When you’re feeding a family of six, you find quicker, easier ways to do things. Convenience foods weren’t too much of a thing back when I was a kid, certainly not in Australia, but we did have the occasional can of meat and veg in the pantry, a few canned soups, some toast spreads and the beginnings of recipe bases. Those weren’t too popular in our house though.
Mum would plop three different types of veg in a pot, fill it with water and stick it on the stove. The result was less washing up and a mish-mash of unidentified vegetable mass that she’d massacre with the potato masher. To say she loved cooking would be a gross overstatement. A lot of mothers in her day cooked to put food on the table. There was no Googling recipes, there was no MasterChef, no inspiration other than the sight of a particular cut of meat on special at the butcher’s, followed by the recognition of what it could be turned into that night.
I didn’t do a lot of cooking before I was married.
I tried my hand at family-size meat pies with from-scratch pastry and believe me, the quick gobbling down of my efforts did not make the hours of hard work seem worth it. I made a few shepherd’s pies, the odd pumpkin soup, a couple of casseroles, and scoured recipe books for more ideas. In the end though, it all seemed too complicated.
When I got married, I became a bit more experimental. I meal planned, shopped, prepped, cooked and desperately sought the approval of my husband’s tastebuds. He was raised Italian too and his mother was an amazing cook, with all her dishes peasant-style, with all the flavour and nutrition you would expect. So he was kindly forthcoming with the praise but, just like any episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, I knew my cooking would never live up to that of my mother-in-law.
In fact, it’s her fault I’m overweight today! As I’ve previously said, I never cared about food. I was skinny as can be when I met my husband-to-be, and then I started going over to his parents’ house and feasting on homemade preserved olives, fresh French stick (bread), big, steaming plates of pasta and what I called her ‘heaven soup’, a fairly ordinary but incredibly flavoursome meat and vegetable pureed broth.
Cooking seemed to come easily to her. She was always at the stove or sink, the house always smelled of something delicious and yet, there was never anything in the fridge or pantry! It was always a mystery how she could cater to unexpected guests with a tasty, generous meal in about thirty minutes flat.
I tried so hard to emulate my mother-in-law’s pasta sauce.
I even had her come over to my house one day, used the exact same ingredients, made it according to her on-the-spot instructions, and it still didn’t taste the same. She just shrugged, laughed and said “I don’t know.” When Everybody Loves Raymond came along and the episode aired where Maree tried to teach Debra how to make meatballs but substituted basil with tarragon to sabotage her, I thought I’d had a lightbulb moment! But the truth was, my mother-in-law’s stove, pots and even her wooden spoon were not the same as those I had in my house. No sabotage, just couldn’t replicate the experience to the fullest.
From my mother-in-law, I learned a few lazy cook tips, like how to make her “quicky-quick” tomato sauce on the fly, but the woman is a culinary giant. With barely any education and raised to serve the men in her life, she cooked pretty much from toddlerhood, using whatever was to hand. We used to joke that “only a mother” could cook like that, and that when I had kids, my cooking would somehow miraculously improve. Later, the joke became that “only a Nonna” could cook like that, so I’m still waiting for my moment in the sun!
Over the years, I came to follow the adage, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Or better yet, as Bill Gates said, “if you want something done efficiently, ask a lazy person”. Not that I’m universally lazy, but I want my food to have lots of flavour, with as little effort as possible. It’s rare that I’ll look at a recipe with a laundry list of ingredients and think, “yeah, that looks like fun”. It’s not fun, not for me. I’ll always find the path of least resistance, whether I’m cooking dinner for myself to eat alone, for when my sons visit or for a crowd.
Stick around as I tell you more stories about food and how to get it on the table (or your lunchbox, your barbecue or your TV tray) with minimal fuss. Life’s too short to spend it cooking. Now let’s eat!