Cooking lessons

I’m not saying this to be boastful but I’m a pretty good cook. Amongst family and friends I’m normally the one who people hope/expect will volunteer to take over the kitchen at big gatherings. Plus I genuinely love cooking as I feel that providing nourishment through food is a beautiful gift to be able to give the people you care about.

But I wasn’t always a great cook but what changed that, or more specifically, who changed that was Rachel.

Rach was a family friend who lived in NZ and who came to visit us in Perth somewhere around the end of 1994 as I was finishing up high school. Rach’s mum and my mum had travelled through Europe together when they were in their early 20s and Rach was setting off on her own European adventure but thought she’d stop in Perth on the way through and visit for a week or so. That couple of weeks ended up being a couple of years and Rach was like a second sister to me. Rach was also a professional cook.

Not long after she arrived my parents went away on a three month holiday leaving Rach and I at home. By that stage both of us had jobs, I was spending the first part of my gap year working in a seafood processing plant and Rach was cheffing at a cafe a few streets from where we were living.

This was the first time I’d had to fend for myself for an extended period and Rach quite fairly expected that I did my share of the cooking. But growing up in a family where the diet was mostly meat and three veg didn’t give me much of a repertoire. Compared to Rach my cooking was slow, low quality and kind of boring.

I remember the first time I saw Rach cook a stir-fry. She had the veges and meat chopped in a few minutes, heated the wok, added ingredients, went to the cupboard and pulled out what appeared to be random condiments, added them to the wok and 10 minutes later served dinner.

My mind was blown.

Over the next few months, probably partly out of love and partly out of a desire to eat nicer food when I cooked, Rach taught me the way around a kitchen. And once you’ve got the basics of some different techniques and different cuisines you can start to explore on your own. I’ve now been exploring for the best part of 30 years but just last night I cooked a stir-fry much like Rach taught me decades ago.

Rach’s Stir-Fry (at least how I remember it)

Ingredients

• Thinly sliced veges such as carrot, snow peas, mushrooms, capsicum, zucchini
• boneless chicken thigh fillets chopped up small
• pre-cooked hoikken noodles
• hoi sin sauce, black bean sauce
• chilli
• peanut oil

Method

1. Heat oil in wok until smoking
2. Add chicken until starting to brown
3. Add hard veges and cook for a few minutes
4. Add soft veges and chilli and cook for a couple of minutes
5. Add a good splash of hoi sin and black bean
6. Add noodles and cook for a couple of minutes until hot
7. Eat

pss. The secret for any stir fry is to make sure it fries and doesn’t stew. The biggest mistake is adding too many ingredients too quickly and everything starts sweating. As soon as this happens the internal temp of the wok can’t get over 100 degrees (as the liquid boils off). The best thing to do if this happens is take everything out and start again…but adding things more slowly.