JOURNEYING INTO THE CULINARY WORLD

We’ve battled hard for our rights…women’s suffrage, women’s empowerment, equality of sexes…chained ourselves to railings, burnt our bras and threw in girdles, curlers and high heels in the pyre…thank God not lipstick…..and here we are now… still trying to shake off the shackles of gender role. For many of us…` What’s for dinner? ‘… sets off a frisson of dread. But there’s hope flickering on the horizon… young couples are now sharing the culinary duties… and much to our delight… retired men folk are finding self-expression in the kitchen, dicing and spicing and playing Master Chef.  

My mum raised four girls and one boy and she always told us girls we had to work to be independent…so work we did and everything else as well. I remember when I first started out…a young mother, wife and career woman, I juggled everything and when it came to cooking…I skirted around it. In between working, running a home and raising a child, I had neither the time nor the inclination to whip up a healthy meal or any meal for that matter. My mother-in-law was always waiting on the sidelines with an enormous pot of food, quick to proffer it with lashings of advice. I sometimes took the food and ignored the advice… but finally found it best to strike out on my own.

 I cooked a lot of fast meals… spaghetti Bolognese, spaghetti with sauce from a jar, frozen supermarket spinach pies and lentils and we did a lot of takeaways…pizza and souvlaki. Then one day I decided enough was enough. I needed to come up with a more workable plan to get healthy home cooked food on the table…so I got the cleaning lady to cook for us.  She was only too happy to do so…she didn’t like cleaning the house much. This went on for a couple of years and then she left and I got another cleaning lady and promoted her to Cook as well…and we continued with takeaways some nights because Yiannis and Annie were not too fond of her food.

But that’s all in the distant past. When I retired I decided to add cooking to my list of interests. But before I could launch off into this new pursuit, I had to prepare the ground for it…grow herbs for a bouquet garni …oregano, thyme, rosemary and basil to throw into Mediterranean dishes and blend into rich sauces and rub into roasts . For curries…there was one thing I couldn’t get in Crete…curry leaf. So on one of our trips to Malaysia, sister number one gave me a small curry leaf plant. I wrapped it up carefully in damp tissue, stowed it away in my suitcase and smuggled it into Greece. It’s grown into a gangly tree now. I also grew lemon grass with razor sharp leaves and seasonal herbs…parsley, coriander leaves, chives etc.

So no more skirting around and procrastinating… I had to get down to the business of cooking proper healthy meals and this time…with a touch of verve and a certain flair. But I needed a little guidance to navigate this exquisite now glorified world of the culinary arts. So I watched Master Chef and picked up a lot of fancy cooking terms from the kitchen cohorts…pontificating  judges and competitors eager to please… slipping in jargon, French no less, to impress the uninitiated and quibbling over… amuse bouche, consomee, coulis, vegetables julienne, Bain Marie etc. I watched it week after week and got drawn into their squabbles and bickering and even took sides and exploded into a…` SERVES YOU RIGHT!!!’… when a swaggering player lost to an amateur, whom he labelled a ` novice’. Yiannis , snoozing in his recliner with his laptop on his knees would jump up with a start and a snort…  emit a couple of humphs and go back to sleep when he realized that it was only me… sitting on the edge of the sofa, eyes glued to the set, bad mouthing both contestants and judges.

I also skimmed through cookery books, browsed through online recipes and followed cooking lessons on You Tube, only to drop out after the first five minutes because they beat around the bush…never got to the point. Anyway, I experimented in the kitchen, all the while listening to music on the radio to throw in some oomph and give me that bit of drive. I could never get the same result twice because the recipes were all in my brain…in various experimental stages. When I did get something right…a beef dish cooked with a dash of soy sauce with sautéed pickled cucumbers and a generous sprinkling of sesame seeds…I boasted of it to my Kung Fu friend, who’s a recipe purist. And of course, she uttered those dreaded words, like sister number one in Malaysia would do… `Give me the recipe’. What recipe??? I wasn’t even sure where I pulled it out from…It could have been from an ancient Good Housekeeping summer recipe or…from one of Jamie Oliver’s shows where he chops up loads of herbs and throws ` the bad boys ‘ in and chats about Thai cuisine and how the Taiwanese use a lot of herbs… Jamie gets his geography confused sometimes. So when she asked for the recipe and she meant when all ingredients are measured to a tee, I would start waffling and saying things like…` just throw in a bit of this and that and…eh…keep adding as you go along. I lost a bit of credibility there.

But that was two years ago. Now I’ve arrived at a good place. I have a limited array of tasty dishes which I can rustle up with my eyes closed. I did a quiz the other day on cooking personalities… …Competitive Cook, Grill King, Kale Queen, Recipe Purist, Wannabees, etc. I didn’t fit into any of the categories until I came to the…Innovative Cook…Yes! That’s me!… I’m glad to say that even in the kitchen… laziness is the mother of all innovation. I shave corners…get the essence of a recipe with one sweeping glance… disregard weighing and measuring because I don’t possess any of those tools… scales, meat thermometers, air fryers etc… I improvise because I never make lists and forget to buy all the ingredients …my cooking time for meat, fish etc varies according to their general appearance…and my latest brainwave…maximum kitchen time of one hour and I’m trying to get it down to a fast and furious forty minutes. I start cooking an hour before Yiannis returns from work. I take off with my mise en place… put on the music, don my apron, glance at the clock, feel the rush of adrenaline as I pull out stuff from the fridge. I peel, chop, blanch, fry, sauté, baste…feeling the pulse of panic in my throat… add a splash of sauce, a squeeze of lemon, a smidgeon of spices, a pinch of salt…then I dash out into the garden and pluck a handful  herbs and toss them into the sizzling hot dish and …VOILA!!!… Talk about living in the present moment and feeling the buzz of being alive!

Bon appetit !