The Cooking 101 series

A beginners guide on how to get started cooking in the kitchen.

I’ve create 6 guides to help you bust your recipe rut, move through your fear of burning down the kitchen and remind you to be a human and have fun while cooking.

Sound like you?

You scour the recipe books in search of big, pretty, well style pictures. Spending hours finding ingredients and trying to cook one dish. It works, or it doesn’t. Not totally the point. The point is you didn’t learn the process.

You’re so focussed in the following of the steps, gripping onto the recipe, reading it, walking away to make a marinade, forgetting what ingredient to use. Rereading the recipe and repeating this process over and over again.

A 60 minute cook time is blown out and before you know it, you’ve spent 6 hours cooking 1 meal with no real recollection of what you’ve done or how you could replicate it next time in a shorter amount of time.

This was my experience a few years ago. Cooking corn fritters, which I loved to make… it would drive my friends crazy. I just had no idea.

You wouldn’t believe how far I’ve come since then, probably only 10 years ago. I learnt to cook. Started a catering business way before I was ready or skilled enough to do so. I fed Sydney, cooked for hundreds of people. 500 was the record in one delivery. I’m not telling this to brag, I’m sharing this because what I learnt from teaching myself to cook is that we get it all wrong.

We’re so busy focussing on the doing, that we forget to soak up the why. We forget to invite our own cooking mojo to the party, so we can follow a recipe but stay present with what’s going on at the same time.

If cooking were a book…

it’d be like opening it in the middle. reading one page.

and expecting yourself to understand the full book. Then being able to deliver a TED talk in front of thousands.

Geees. PRESSURE!

what if, instead of over-compliating everything we make we break it down into sections.

It’s in building the confidence. Confidence in yourself that if things get busy, you can still make a meal from what’s in your pantry. Yeahhh ok so it may not be Nigella standard (or maybe you’ll surprise yourself). That’s cool, because you’re just living your full life with lots of things going on and you didn’t get a chance to do your meal prep ritual on the weekend. Totally fine. It’s edible, you tinkered in the kitchen, learnt that your rice ratio is solid, you can now do that with your eyes closed >>> and from this place the cooking process gets easier.

Speaking of meal prep. I hate that word.

What I’ve found (and my clients tell me), the beauty is setting this up as a ritual – it’s not a go go go, achieve, prep, package process.

It’s a pot of this, a tray of that, a pasta bake in the oven… its utilising your time in the kitchen and cooking for when you know you won’t want to. Maybe your kid gets sick, or you get sick, or work requires you to stay late, or you’re so engrossed in a project you’re trying to launch in your biz. Cooking for these times is delicious, your future self will thank your past self.

Your cooking wizard status is just out of reach, it requires a leap
and a rewiring of your brain about how you think about food and cooking.
It requires tinkering in the kitchen, a sense of fun and play.
I’m here to take the pressure OFF, wipe the sweat off your brow,
give you a pat on the back and encourage you to simplify and explore.

Here are my steps – they’re totally not what you think… I can tell you this because I’ve fed corporates, I’ve fed governments, I’ve fed kids, I’ve fed my husband, I’ve fed my nephews, I’ve taught thousands of people to cook through my simple food creations.

Seemingly veggies chopped up, with a bit of haloumi or poached meat and a full bodied dressing. sprinkled with texture.

Cooking can be simple.

Your flavour bomb creations can be simple. Mine always are and if it’s good enough for the fancy international Government board meetings, it’s good enough for you.

Don’t make this process more complicated than it needs to be.