My Love - Food

Food is one of many loves I have and in this series of blogs you will get to read about them all.

I can't really remember when i started loving food (for more than just its nutritional and survival factors), I do remember me and my cousin cooking up a storm (that was later cleaned up by my aunt and uncle), when i used to sleep over as a teenager.  But i seriously started cooking for myself when I was like 15/16.  I started of as anyone else would, using pre-made sauces to make pasta's, and curries.  Then I moved on and started making recipes from magazines and books.  Peter Russell Clarke was a big early influence, mainly because I got 3 magazine style cookbooks of his through a Kraft promotion.   

My cooking didn't really kick off until i was 26/27, by then we had moved out of the shop and were living in a normal house, no Milk Bar attached.  It was then that my experimentation started, I would go out eat something I liked, and come back and try and make it at home, no recipe or anything, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.  It was also around this time, that I stopped using, pre-made sauces and started making my own curry pastes, pasta sauces and marinades from scratch. 

Its unbelievable the thrill you get when you make your own sauces etc..., not to mention the taste.  The thing that I found was that it wasn't that hard to do, especially now that we have so many more ingredients available to us here in Australia.  I highly recommend making your curry pastes in particular, the freshness of the meal, the vibrancy of the flavors is magnificent compared to just opening a jar and pouring in the sauce. 

I have now moved on to making my own pasta, even baking bread and i won't look back.  Sure all these things take time, but take pasta for instance, it might take about 2 hours to make, mainly due to waiting for the dough to rise, but it is so worth it, you haven't eaten pasta until you eat freshly made pasta. 

My next goal is deserts, I want to learn how to make a good choux pastry, I tried it, but it didn't work the first time, but then again I didn't really concentrate hard on doing ti properly,  I just tried it to see how easy/hard it would be, now I realise I need to do everything exactly how it is explained. 

The other thing that I have discovered is that the more cookbooks you read and recipes you try the more you work out how flavours, ingredients interact with each other.  If you do that you soon don't need a recipe, you can just do it of the top of your head.  The greatest thing about cooking is the experimentation, you try and taste and try and taste. 

I really don't get people who say cooking is too hard, or they don't have time, seriously you can cook a great meal for you and your family in less than 30 min if you really want too.  Maybe if people put more time into cooking and less time into their gadgets and other crap, we might be able to turn around the obesity problem we have in Australia.  Rather than go out to Macca's make your own burgers, and if you want use the bloody pre-made stuff, but trust me its no where near as good as freshly made. 

As well as my love for cooking, comes my love of eating, and it is one of my goals to visit as many of Melbourne's finest eateries as possible.  I am even compiling my own review system for these places, and its not just high end, fine dining restaurants, its anywhere, where you can get a good feed. 

Well I hope you enjoyed this, and if anyone needs any help with their cooking feel free to let me know. 

In part two of this blog I will look at chefs, and who my favourites are and who I don't rate.

Also stay tuned for the rest of the My Love series of blog.