Mum always cooked fresh, it was a mix between chinese food and ‘aussie food’. It could be steak with rice, chicken curry, lamb chops with bok choi or stir fried noodles with roast chicken. One thing for sure is that the food was always fresh and tasty and there was plenty of it. Later on when all of us left home, mum had a problem with cooking too much food but who could blame her after 20 years of cooking for 6 people including three growing boys.
My job when it was nearing dinner time was to peel and chop the garlic and ginger, it was inevitable that these two spices would feature in practically every meal. Mum showed me how to lay the meat clever flat and smash the garlic on the chopping board. I’d then slice thinly then chop it into little pieces. She showed me how to use a tea spoon to peel the ginger for the least amount of waste and cut it across the fibrous grain. I don’t think parents realise how these simple repetitive jobs end up shaping their kids later on. To this day i don’t use a garlic mincer and when my kitchen is out of garlic its verging on a culinary disaster, but don’t worry there will always be a jar of ready minced garlic in the fridge.
I can’t remember ever having a choice whether to help mum in the kitchen or not. It was simply a matter of, if you were hungry, you needed to help, there were several jobs that just needed to be done like setting the table. As a left hander i would always get the cutlery set the wrong way, and it became a joke, dad would say “did Jacqui set the table?”. I would say that it didn’t matter which way the cutlery went, and to this day i still don’t care! When chopsticks were required (noodles) i would always knock them accidentally against the person to my right’s chopsticks at our round kitchen table, so there needed to be more space to my left on noodle nights. My mum wasn’t strict about much as there was always so much to do that being a perfectionist was never a priority. But one thing i do remember is that we would never have rice and noodles at the same meal. It was rice OR noodles and that was that.
After dinner someone would bring the pre-prepared tea tray out from the kitchen. It had 6 mugs (all different) and a pot of tea and a little jug of milk. We would sit at the table when most of the dishes were cleared and someone would pour the tea. When it was my job i would make a big show of it by either pouring the tea from a great height or putting the mugs very close together and pouring the tea out in one single stream between the cups. It was a performance not because I was an attention seeker, it was because I learnt that humour was the only way to break the ice when people were stressed or angry. There was often tension at home. Whether it be between one of my brothers, or dad and mum. Things could always change on a knife’s edge. Due to the fact that we always had loose leaf tea there was an art to pouring. The tea would start weak, and then get stronger as there was less water in the pot, so you would fill the cups to about ⅓ full and then do all 6 and then go backwards back to the first cup so all cups ended up having the same strength tea. This was another thing mum taught me, she was full of hacks before the word hack was even invented.
The last thing i will say about cooking at dinner time right now is a little more light hearted. Our second drawer in the kitchen was always a danger zone. Knives, bottle openers, tin openers and skewers were all rammed into the drawer. When mum asked me to pass her something from this drawer i would always attempt the same joke. I’d say “gosh this drawer is dangerous!” or “have you ever cut yourself trying to get something out of this drawer?” Mum would always absently say “oh yeah it is dangerous” or “be careful”. I remember thinking that it wasn’t really dangerous at all it because i am a smart dexterous girl who can navigate past all the sharp stuff to easily pass you that serrated knife. The second drawer was a life test and a life lesson all in one. Not sure what those lessons are, but i’m sure there is one!
Dinner at our house was always fast and furious. The food was prepared in stages between fillings and extractions in the surgery. There would often be a bag of food defrosting in the sink and then another stage of it being in a pot and then it would all be finished off on the stove and appear on the table straight out of the pots and pans. One day when i got home from school, i was in the kitchen rooting around for a snack, there as a big pot of some kind of mince meat bubbling away on the stove. It was common for me to taste things at the various stages of cooking, so i got a spoon out and ate some straight out of the pot. A few hours later at dinner time when we were eating lamb chops or something complete different, i asked “what happened to the stew on the stove? We didn’t have that for dinner is it for a different meal?” Mum laughed and she said “that was Rolly’s food” (that was our dog). From then on, i always asked before trying things, but i also knew that mum cooked Rolly’s food with as much love and care as our own food. Rolly’s ashes are still in a ceramic pot on mum’s bedside table.
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I will publish following chapters of this work in progress book here on this blog. I am not sure where this will lead. But i want to share these thoughts publicly for my family to find as and when they do. I want to make clear that i only have positive intensions by writing this story and i hope no one takes offence to what i am writing. Please comment with any questions or comments as this project takes shape.
