Food, glorious food!

Yesterday was a fairly typical Saturday for me. Got up at about 9 o'clock, had breakfast, washed the left-over dishes and things that wouldn't fit in the dish washer, cleared the bench, got out all the ingredients and implements, and started to make bread. I make two dozen wholemeal bread rolls every second Saturday. It's impossible to buy bread rolls anywhere that taste as fresh and as wonderful as home-made rolls, and there's the added pride in having put them together yourself.

Bread is actually quite easy to make, there's no mystery about it. The most difficult part of it when I started baking bread was finding a suitable spot to let the dough rise. It needs to be considerably warmer than normal room temperature, though not too hot (or the yeast will die). I spent some time sticking bowls in cupboards with electric fan heaters, propping bowls over the vents of the central heating system, and so on. All nonsense. The best way, I've found, is to turn on the oven on its lowest heat, about ten minutes before the dough is ready. It shouldn't get any warmer than about 60°. Then you turn the oven off, put the bread in, in a deep bowl covered with a damp cloth, and set the timer for 45 minutes. Same sort of process once you've shaped the bread, except you only need to leave the bread in for about 30 minutes then.

Bread is a good thing to make when you have other things to do, because the long waiting times for the bread to rise can be filled in with other useful things. On Saturday, once the bread was mixed and kneaded (I must be out of condition - hard work, this!), and in the oven to rise, I peeled and cored a bowlful of left-over apples to make the filling for apple pie, which could cook simultaneously with the bread. I'm not a purist; I used commercial pre-rolled pastry sheets from the freezer for the pie base and top. Pastry is one thing I haven't yet mastered.

I cooked the apples, covered, in the microwave, for about ten minutes. Set them aside to cool. Took out the bread, kneaded it again, shaped it into rolls, weighing each lump to make sure the rolls were of an even size. Put them back in the re-warmed oven.

Then I went down the street to buy meat and vegetables. Bought (among other things) a bunch of leeks, an eggplant, some limes and bananas, pork chops and minced lamb.

Came back and took out the now-risen bread rolls and cranked the oven up to high. Cut out the pastry and lined a dish with it, then covered this over with foil so it could be blind-baked.

The pie base and the bread-rolls go into the oven once it is hot, for about ten minutes and fifteen minutes respectively.

Oh, the smell of new-baked bread! Oh, the taste of warm bread with butter melting into it! Why doesn't everyone still do this?

The pie is filled, the top put on. My daughter insisted on decorating the pie with shaped pieces of pastry. Very nice, but I fidgeted because she takes a long time, and the oven is hot! Then in it went, for another twenty minutes or so. (This day it was a minor disaster, because the apple filling was very wet, and we got juice bubbling out of the pie, so the pie stayed in for longer than usual to dry it off a little).

Slightly more major disaster later on, as my daughter is keen on cooking along with Dad, and she was making a sort of muesli slice from a recipe on the side of the cereal packet. It involves putting the mix into the food processor for a while to mince down. But the blade of the food processor tends to get stuck when you want to lift the bowl up off the motor. Dad tried to help, and the blade came off - very suddenly. Dad spent the next twenty minutes picking little bits of muesli off the bench, the toaster, the jug, the walls, the cupboards, the floor...

Lunch was easy, there were left-overs from the previous couple of nights' dinners.

After lunch, I set to and make potato and leek soup. Another minor disaster because I filled the food processor too full of cooked ingredients and soup started to leak everywhere - but this was soon remedied.

Around five o'clock it's time to start work on dinner. I bought the eggplant and the minced lamb with moussaka in mind, and that's what I produced. The microwave is invaluable for this, because it cooks a whole casserole full in around twenty minutes. It would take well over an hour in the oven. My daughter announced her disgust with eggplant well before dinner is cooked, but when the moussaka was served, she ate it all and asked for more.

I had intended to make steamed pudding with the limes and the bananas, but we were all too full. Besides, there was apple pie and cream.

The following day, Sunday, we had leek and potato soup for lunch. Dinner was roast lamb, roast potatoes, roast onions, broccoli and red-wine gravy. Wonderful!

Why do I do all this? Well, because I love it, of course.

I have this theory that most women don't enjoy cookery because they have been brought up to believe that it is their duty to cook for their families, and who can enjoy an enforced duty? Whereas men who cook love it to little pieces because they never feel that they have to do it.

I started cooking for myself when I first moved away from home, twenty years ago (!), and started by producing some absolutely vile things (run out of onions - oh well, these pickled onions are sure to do just as well...). But I enjoyed cooking even then. I seem to recall that when a bunch of us went on the Cradle Mountain / Lake St.Clair bushwalk in Tasmania, taking six days meandering up side walks, I did almost all of the cooking, with some notable disasters. (Vesta Curry and Rice was bad enough, but burnt Vesta Curry and Rice was something to be experienced).

Nowadays, Sue and I share cooking the evening meals during the week pretty evenly, though there are weeks I come home so zonked from work that I don't lift a finger all week.

But weekends I usually do all the cooking, lunches and dinners and the extra stuff like special desserts and baking, as mentioned above. And I enjoy it enormously. As much as anything else, I enjoy cooking as a hobby because it is utterly different from what I do at work, and perhaps for this reason I find it very relaxing (disasters aside!). This is probably why I usually don't mind coming home from a hard day at work and then cooking the family meal.

I am certainly no purist. I love all the labour-saving gadgets that our mothers and grandmothers had to do without, like my big Breville whizzer, which is terrific for any large-quantity chopping, mincing or shredding. Even better, I like the little Breville Whiz Kid Twins which has two sets of bowls and blades with a removable motor which sits on top. One set is like a midget one-cup quantity food processor, fantastic for blending up tinned tomatoes, or pureeing a cup-full of solids for soup. The other set is a small one- or two- cup blender, great for instant milk-shakes.

And the electric knife. How did I live without this, for cutting roasts, for slicing home-made loaves of bread as thin as commercial bread?

I also adore the microwave. But I didn't use to. I spent several years scoffing at microwave ovens. I used to love quoting a joke out of a humorous dictionary of cooking:

Microwave Oven: A device based on the radar technology of World War II, which will instantly seek out and destroy any food placed within its cavity.

But in the end, it was listening to Geoff Slattery on the radio that convinced me to buy a microwave. He kept on emphasising that you don't buy a microwave oven to do things that you can do much better by conventional means. You use a microwave to do what it does best. He calls the microwave "an extra pair of hands in the kitchen". And he's absolutely right. When I finally gave way, I found that the microwave oven quickly became indispensable.

Like many people, I was very disappointed when Geoff Slattery announced that he was no longer going to appear on the Doug Aiton radio show every Tuesday. It used to be one of the highlights of the week to listen to Slattery talking about food and cooking whilst I drove home on Tuesday evenings. Geoff Slattery has a wonderfully irreverent attitude to cooking, and an infectious enthusiasm about it. I warmly recommend his book "Simple Flavours" to anyone who wants to cook without fuss and for pleasure.

It was Geoff Slattery who introduced me to souffles. Souffles, like bread, have a wholly undeserved reputation for being hard to cook. People who demonstrate that they can cook either are usually the subject of universal admiration these days. What nonsense! Souffles, like bread, are easy, so long as you keep your eye on the ball. (The other thing I love about Geoff Slattery's writing about cooking is his frequent use of sporting metaphors - Slattery was also the Sports Editor for "The Sunday Age" for some time).

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Now what would a cooking article be without including a recipe? So here's my own recipe for making bread. Give it a try.