Chen Chris - The zero fucks cookbook: best food least effort

This book is for all the people who woke up one morning and realised they actually didn't give a fuck.

CONTENTS

I love food.

I love delicious morsels of comfort and luxury and I think about eating constantly. Its one of the great pleasures in my life, but here we go: I have zero fucks left to give to bullshit cooking that wastes time, creates work and adds a whole unnecessary level of wankery to otherwise honest food.

I say NO to smoking my own meat, making puff pastry, dealing with a pigs head or in any way taking time out of my own busy life to do bullshit things to food.

Most nights I cook to feed at least six, often more. My house is total chaos. Its a zoo. Often an extra person or two arrives at my dinner table with little warning and I have to improvise and figure it out, but dont get me wrong I love it. Its been a lifelong desire that my table should be welcoming, that people can just drop in, that anyone can cop a feed.

But I want to have fun too. I want to enjoy my family and enjoy visitors and not be at the stove or head in fridge, impressing God-knows-who with some stupid-arse thing that tastes no better than a lovely slice of cucumber or a perfectly roasted potato. Heres the thing: so much food is inherently delicious and doesnt need a helluva lot of intervention. Cucumber? Cut it with a knife. Yum. Bread? Add butter. Delicious.

If I want wanky food I will happily go to a restaurant and pay for someone elses white peach vierge dressing or fermented koji butter. At home? I already gave my fucks away. My loved ones will eat. The food I make is delicious. And Ill cook it because its easy. Its what youve gotta do when youre cooking with a sum total of zero fucks.

YUMI XX

I used to want to be a chef.

Early on in my adult life I worked as a cook in a couple of pubs and resorts around Australia. Let me tell you from experience that this kind of work is sexy and exhilarating. There is adrenaline, swagger, and ego, and with your co-workers theres a physical dance of cooperation, coordination, and brute force. There is shouting, laughing, pressure and, at the heart of it all, the pursuit of the sensory pleasures of food.

Im into it. Im into going to restaurants and letting professionals with all their swagger and skills use their training to take shit next level. I dig it. This is why I pay money for meals and, I confess, it is a considerable ongoing investment.

So, when I see cooking shows and recipe books encouraging crazy amounts of work, fuss and perfectionism in the average home cook, I shake my head. THIS IS NOT FOR ME! Leave it to the chefs!

I had a breakthrough a few years ago when I was preparing food for a post-marathon barbecue. A bunch of runners were coming back to my place and would all be hungry. What to do? The miso marinade for barbecued eggplant I made was so easy that I couldnt quite believe it, and I had to resist the urge to add in complications! I realised that equating personal labour with the love and care I wanted to express was STUPID. You can give yourself permission to choose cooking that is easy, but still exalts the food and the eaters of the food! (The eggplant was a hit, by the way, and I still make it to this day the recipe is .)

Zero Fucks is all about making the best food with the least amount of fuss. I say YES to beautiful ingredients, simply assembled. I say YES to eating things that make you feel good and I say YES to making them without stressing. I say YES, YES, YES to letting the natural flavour and goodness of food sing.

I say yes to shortcuts, hacks, tricks and pre-made. I say yes to sometimes using expensive ingredients. (This is Zero Fucks after all, not Zero Bucks.) But I also say yes to avoiding waste, yes to making healthy choices and yes to celebrating the marvel that is food.

The older I get, the fewer fucks I have spare. I give a fuck about my family, my friends, and my work. Everything else? Well thats what this is about.

When I was a kid living in rural Victoria, sourcing Asian ingredients was a mission involving a 350-km drive to the big city (Melbourne), where wed stay overnight with my Aunty Tasma and stock up on art, culture and food. I remember standing with my mum at the checkout of the inner-city Japanese grocer with my mouth hanging open: everything we got was so expensive and so precious. Wed cart our loot back to Swan Hill and my mum would ration things out only one piece of seaweed per kid, no more!

Im not interested in cooking with hard-to-find ingredients. And I dont have an exotic spice mart at my doorstep any more than you do. Luckily, nowadays mainstream supermarkets all over the country stock items we used to travel hours to buy. Its such a gift.

Heres the thing, everything in this book can be bought from a mainstream regular supermarket. So if youre looking through and thinking, Nope, I dont know where to get that, you might need to look a bit harder. It could be right there in front of you. As we say in my house, Have a grown-up look. This applies to my friends, who mostly live in big cities but call me up to tell me, I dont know where to get Panko breadcrumbs! To which I say, Have a grown-up look! The most average supermarket in suburbia stocks them.' And soy sauce. And miso paste, and mirin. Just have a good look and if youre stuck, ask someone who works there!

Most bottle shops sell sak. Pre-made sauces like soba sauce are harder to come by but every Asian grocer will stock them.

I also try to avoid ingredients that you use once and then clog your pantry for five years.

Don't get me wrong, I love pursuing food and odd ingredients like a mad horndog. But most of the time I dont have time. This book is for the most-of-the-time times. I want you to be able to use the staples you keep in your pantry, and if you happen to find a beautiful snapper, or some Jerusalem artichokes, then youll know what to do with them.

Rice

I use regular short-grain white rice. My mum buys crazy expensive imported Japanese rice and swears she can taste the difference but it doesnt bother me. All my rice is grown in Australia.

Salted butter

Salted butter is the standard in this book (I cant taste the difference between food cooked with salted or unsalted butter, to be honest). I live in Sydney, Australia, and I leave mine out of the fridge except in the middle of summer. I can get away with this because I use it before it has time to go feral.

Soy sauce

I use a Japanese-style soy sauce, Kikkoman, for all my recipes. Chinese soy sauce has a very different taste if you have some and want to use it, it will work in my .

Spring onions (scallions)

I mean the long, pencil-thin ones with a short white base and a long, dark-green tail, common to every supermarket, greengrocer and Asian foodmart.

Whipped garlic

Whipped garlic is a hack I discovered a few years ago in my local grocer. Its sold as Garlic Dip, can be found in the refrigerated section along with other dips and is basically a whipped blend of garlic, oil and nothing else. It doesn't taste like the manky minced garlic your mum used to buy in jars. This tastes exactly like garlic, but a little milder, and I mostly use it when I want a superfine mince or cant be bothered crushing, chopping or grating. Use a tablespoon to replace a clove.