Food, Fads and Females

Dear my collective girls make life difficult for me! I love them dearly, but they have really destroyed my cooking.

I learned my initial cooking from my mum. English-Australian. I especially loved the roasts and the casseroles with their thick sauce. At university I was exposed to Asian food - Thai, Chinese, Indian. So I added this.

When I moved to Canberra there were food phases. I learned to cook more Indian curries. There was the Vietnamese arrival, so I learned to prepare a range of Vietnamese dishes. I miss the relative disappearance of Vietnamese food.

I had a big garden at times, so was always looking for new ways to prepare surplus food. Then my house mate cooked a mean East Coast Laska. And we had great steamboats. And food prepared in the back yard. Whole BBQ fish.

Canberra's Italo-Australia club. I became a member and ate there four or five times a week. I have never been very keen on pasta, but added more dishes.

In all this, I ignored food fashions. When milk products were bad for you I snorted, and went on using cheeses, drinking milk, using cream in cooking. Then red meat was bad. I ate my steaks with pleasure.

I married and had daughters. My culinary world shrunk.

Youngest will not eat curry, hates chili. Neither daughter will eat casseroles. Both dislike fresh sweet corn, even with some pepper and lashings of butter. They do like butter! One or other of 80% of sea products are disliked by someone.

My wife, worried about her weight and health, has been on a series of diets. These always seem to involve the sale of food products. So in these phases she eats alone, while I look after the rest.

All my girls like Lebanese and pasta, but I am less keen. Consequently I am less good at preparing this food.

In all this, I must have lost eighty per cent of my cooking skills. For simplicity's sake, we are back to meat and two or three veg. Or a roast. My mother would sympathise!