The only people I know who understand Ottolenghi cookbooks are coming for dinner tomorrow night. Actually, not only do they understand them, they’ve managed to find all the ingredients for one of his salads in a single day of shopping.
These people are serious about food. They’ve been known to marinate lamb three days before a casual mid-week dinner. They parboil potatoes before they roast them. Their kids will sit down to a plate of stuffed onions and fattoush. Their cupboards are filled with jars of things I’ve never heard of – dukkah, harissa and zhoug, which one could be forgiven for thinking are the names of people they know except that they’re condiments from the Ottolenghi cookbook.
How am I going to pull off dinner for them when my signature dish is roast chicken stuffed with herbs from a Donna Hay book someone gave me 15 years ago? I find working with more than four ingredients a challenge. I overcook lamb. My most ambitious dessert is Eskimo Pies with strawberries. And I like fennel but avoid it because I’m not sure how to cut into it.
How can I tell my food-literate friends that I once spent an afternoon in the IGA looking for garam masala in the booze section? That I wouldn’t know a stick of lemon grass if I fell over it. That I manage my cooking anxiety by being hyper-organised and peaking early, so by the time guests arrive everything’s dry and overcooked and I’m ready for bed.
I can sense a competitive-cooking dinner-party cycle brewing, and I need to put a lid on that dutch oven before it starts to simmer. I have no time for upping the ante every time someone cooks a nice dinner for me, and no interest in getting up at dawn to get started on a pork belly and iron the linen.
I’ve been in a competitive-cooking dinner-party cycle before, and it’s vicious. It was a while ago, back in the day when we were in share houses and cooking was a novelty. Actually, eating anything other than dim sims and spaghetti bolognese was a novelty.
They were heady days. We dined high on the hog – well, actually dinners were more nostalgic for our mums’ cooking than grand, as we mastered old Kooka stoves with one operating burner and ovens that no one ever cleaned. We ate corned beef with mash and tuna bake, and sometimes punched higher than our weight with pesto made from scratch. And then we’d smoked a couple of Benson & Hedges between courses.
Right now, I’d do anything for a plate of my old roomies’ hand-crumbed chicken schnitzels, which she garnished artistically with warm avocado and hollandaise. Sadly, we fell out after I accidently dropped a plate of her hand-crafted tiramisu when I pulled it out of the fridge. She called it sabotage, but the truth is that the tiramisu’s demise was caused by too many glasses of Houghton’s White Burgundy on my part.
It’s not hard to see where my anxiety comes from. Anyway, someone suggested I do a beef burgundy because it’s safe, reasonably simple, and slow-cooked for long enough you can’t tell if I burnt the onion and garlic a bit at the start. And no lemon grass.
