Photo credit; LOM
Cooking in the 21st century has become unnecessarily complicated. It’s like employing a helicopter to relocate a baby wombat from one side of the Murrumbidgee River to the other when I could have done the same job more rapidly and economically using my slingshot.
After tapping your utensils to the beat of the following gastronomic etude you will be left flabbergasted and wondering “How on earth did GOF reach this extraordinary level of proficiency in the kitchen with so little practical experience?”
The obvious answer is that I was tapped on the shoulder at an early age by the spatula of epicureanism and endowed with the golden gift of culinary genius, because Lord knows it most certainly didn’t come from spending long hours sweating over chopping boards or peering with hopeful expectation into oven windows.
For two reasons;
1. Someone else has always been happy to step up to the hotplate whenever my plane of nutrition has dipped to a dangerously low level.
2. I am an excellent browser and forager of nature’s foodstuffs which don’t require the application of heat in order to render them edible. For example, Weetbix.
From the beginning;
My Mum somehow prevented the early onset of kwashiorkor and the addition of little gof’s name to Australia’s infant mortality statistics, despite all the wowsers and moral missionaries during the 1940’s warning new mothers against “putting your disgusting filthy pornographic nipples into the mouths of innocent babes.”
I survived by suckling on the teats of Beatrice, our tolerant, nurturing and productive Jersey cow who had all the necessary Government approvals and documentation enabling her to be a wet nurse for Australian children.
Eventually my parents decided that I’d been freeloading long enough so they dumped me on the doorstep of a residential Agricultural College at the age of sixteen. During the following three years a coagulation of greasy foreign chefs fed me food which clogged my arteries and cemented my stools to Building Foundation Strength Number 10.
Then came New Guinea and a succession of domestic servants, two of whom I am happy to report were considerably more picturesque than useful in the kitchen. One school of thought is that I was nothing but a lazy, spoilt and pampered little colonial bastard, but truth is that I was generously contributing to the local economy by employing them.
For the last 32 years Mrs GOF has been captain of my ship of nutrition, so it is always dietarily disconcerting at times like this when she leaves me alone in my inadequately victualled lifeboat to fend for myself. There is a real risk that I may founder on the shoals of starvation.
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This has occasionally been mistaken for Australia’s Coat of Arms.
It is actually a pictorial menu.
Today I choose kangaroo.
Ingredients; This scrumptious recipe includes all three food groups essential to good health.
1. ANIMALS. 2. VEGETABLES. 3. MINERALS.
1. ANIMALS;
Skippy mince with a subtle continental influence.
2. VEGETABLES;
There are green ones, and yellow ones and white ones and orange ones, and they all get put in…….etc etc
3. MINERALS;
These three products contain all the minerals essential for good health such as 551, 635, 721, 257, 312, Sodium, Chlorine and Potassium iodate.
Cooking;
One saucepan only. The use of more than one saucepan, one knife, one fork and one plate is extravagant and will result in avoidable sink-misery afterwards.)
Plating up
The secret to truly great food lies in the process which we chefs refer to as ‘plating up’. Delicious food like this deserves to be presented with love, care and artistic finesse. Please take careful note of the following delicate sequence.
1. plate on top of saucepan thus
2. invert quickly
3 voila….GOF’s Roo Stew for Bachelors….bon appetit.
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Ooooh……gotta go. Now in what cupboard did I put my Imodium?
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