The Recipe Dispatch: Mom's Edition
The best thing my mother taught me (and the recipes I still make from her kitchen!)
The sun is going down on a weekday and you have no idea what to cook for dinner. The baby is clamoring at your knees, your older child is whining and you have half a cabbage, some cheese, strawberries, and ground beef. Can you make something out of nothing? One of the best things my mother ever taught me was how to take what we had in the kitchen of my teenage years, and turn it into food. This came in handy when I was a starving model home from clubbing with my friends, all of them perched on the countertops of our Paddington rental. I opened the fridge and pantry finding flour, milk, eggs and Nutella. In about 20 minutes we were eating Nutella crepes on the floor by the stove at 2am, and they all looked at me like I was a magician, or just someone who would make a really good mom.
More often than not, necessity is the mother of invention, which is why I was put in charge of cooking for my tween twin brothers and our Dad while Mum was overseas chaperoning our sister Gemma on her incredible modeling odyssey. For years I’d sat at the blue laminate kitchen island with the cast iron chairs, learning how to properly chop an onion or mince garlic with a paring knife. I’d watch her maneuver huge trays of root vegetables into the oven, stir infinite pots, woks and saucepans, and even produce things as exotic as pork crackling and tagines from seemingly nowhere.
Then I turned 18, and it was my turn to be head chef (at least for a few weeks.)
Her advice was this:
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