Cooking was not something that I thought highly of when I was a child. Eating, that was another matter but the corelation between the two was not obvious to me until later. I spent many Saturday mornings at my Nan’s house marvelling at the food she produced. Better than any restaurant then or since. Conversely, my mum was not a fan, just as I wasn’t that keen on hers. Anecdotally I think there is some resonance between the generations either side of a parent. Anyway, I was largely disinterested in the process and at school when we had to do such things I was hostile to it. That all changed when I left home and found that microwave meals were too small and not all that good.
My nan, a former schoolteacher had realised my reluctance to engage early on so taught me by stealth. “Come and tell me what you’ve been doing while I’m in the kitchen,” she would say. I got asked to pass ingredients, stir pots and she would interject here and there why she was putting mustard in the cheese sauce or why onions and capsicums were best fried before browning the meat. Oblivious, I talked about my plans to become a strongman or join the military or whatever and it was years later that I realised what I’d learned and when.
It’s served me well. I can knock up decent meals and not just for myself: the most I have ever fed is 86. This was at a youth camp and over an open fire too. It’s that time of year again when I travel for a few days to an activity centre to cook for a similar group of young people, just about 35 this time though. It’s three meals a day plus snacks and the washing up can be overwhelming. Away from my usual activities, I do some calisthenics and isometrics after dark and early mornings and usually plan what’s next training wise. It’s a bit of a reset. Those I’m feeding are oblivious to this – to them, I’m just the cook.
It always makes me smile because on the charter boat that I used to work on we escorted English Channel Swimmers and I had a number of duties – steering the boat across the shipping lanes on the return trip at night was one of them, swimming or kayaking in with the finishing swimmers was another. There were a few occasions where I had to put the wet gear on and go underneath to cut rope or nets off the propellers. There were moments of imminent danger and I have stood on the deck with a tyre iron or other implement, ready to repel borders. More mundane but no less enjoyable I cooked a full English Breakfast each morning and often an evening meal too. It can be challenging when a tanker goes past at 15 knots and the boat climbs over the bow wave. A knee has held the grill pan in place and beans were being stirred whilst the other hand danced between two fry pans with eggs, bacon and tomatoes in. Banana pancakes at 1am was a speciality. It was a strange sort of job and I told the story of it again to my mate Chris who is the smiling killer who runs the café at a neighbouring judo club. We reflected that we could both use the line from Steven Seagall’s film UNDER SIEGE – “I’m just the cook.”
See you down the road.
