Gibbs - After Toast: Recipes for aspiring cooks

First published in 2012

Copyright Kate Gibbs 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Fairfax Books, an imprint of
Allen & Unwin
Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email:
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 9781742697758

Photography credits:
Food photography by Louise Lister, Kristin Hove and Kate Gibbs

All other photography by Kristian Taylor Wood and Kate Gibbs

Design by Lindbjerg Graphic Pty Ltd
Set in 11/14 pt AFBattersea

DEDICATION

To my amazing mum and dad, who taught me love of food, the world and everything.

To Margaret Fulton, most inspiring grandmother a girl could have. Youll forever be the leader of our pack, in life and in food.

And for Ben, my great culinary dreamer-upper.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

In AFTER TOAST, Kate Gibbs visits the culinary lives of young, aspiring cooks. She relives her own cooking steps at a teenager and young adult, and delves into the lives, interests, language, expressions and fresh ideas of the young for food.

We start with Breakfast, with recipes such as Not-quite huevos rancheros and Frog in the holeround egg, round hole. It all seems like great fun. What a good idea to have a Great-fast smoothie or a Peaches and cream smoothie, and with Hash browns and Bacon and corn muffins, breakfast presents as a meal you just wouldnt want to miss.

Kate offers good, sensible advice, too. This book kind of demands a love of food, she writes. I just dont believe you can cook well unless you love to eat. Theres no hint of the school marm about thisits knowing the realities of bad habits, the mistakes that many of us make in our early years when cooking and eating.

Snacks are given a healthy spin with the likes of Holy moley guacamole. Lunch and Dinner is appropriate with the same enthusiasm. The chapter Parties & Friends is a cheerful way to say what-to-cook through any social spell, while eating well.

Hints scattered through the book shed light on complicated subjects for the culinary novice. How to host a sophisticated gathering tells you: First tidy up, but remember, youre having friends over, not the Queen. So sure, clean the bathroom. Get a bunch of flowers if you like and pop them in a large glass jar. Its good advice for even the more established host.

With so many mouth-watering photographs and simple-to-follow recipes, it will be easy to spoil family and friends, and yourselves. You will enjoy the many expert tips on cooking, life and the world that are scattered through the book. The design also warrants a mention, it just adds to the excitement.

Rarely have I read a book that invades and expresses an age and era so completely. And not only thatthese words and recipes make such good reading. This book has cast a magic spell over me, taking me back in time to my own youth, to a time that wasnt quite so forward-thinking and exciting as this book offers. May I say, I want to be 20 again!

Congratulations, my granddaughter, Kate.

MARGARET FULTON

Love food, can cook

Theres a sound that happens when you run your finger along the spines of books packed into a bookshelf. Tap tap tap tap click click tap tap. The sound changes depending on whether theyre little paperback novels or those hard-cover, thick-bound, seriously big books. Or a long row of cookbooks, say. Dont let this book become one of those books that just sit there gathering dust. Instead, keep it with you to actually use.

This book is about how to make food. Food to eat. Food you can cook. Food that youll want to eat, and that you will like, and that your friends and family will like. Food youll be really, really proud to tell your mates you cooked.

I am not entirely sure I buy in to the idea of kids or young peoples food, in the sense that the more you restrict the sorts of food you eat, the less adventurous youll be with food for the rest of your life.

You can scale a wall. You can tell your little brother what to do. Youve heard of trigonometry and can spell words like Mississippi and hyperbole. You can do a very cool dance in your room by yourself and you know how to upload videos to YouTube. You can text as fast as you can talk. You can do mini peace talks between friends, you can surf, and you know one to ten in another language. Dude, you can cook pots de creme.

My parents have a whole room in their house full of cookbooks. My mothers a professional cook, so that makes sense. I grew up surrounded by amazing, healthy and real foodmy mum and dad had me stirring pots and chopping herbs and deglazing pans once I was tall enough to see over the kitchen bench. I knew what a roux was and I knew 180 Celsius was a reasonable temperature to bake many things. But it wasnt until I was much older that I actually cooked an entire meal. By myself.

As a self-declared foodie as a teenager, I once told my friends Id make roast chicken for them while my parents were away. Easy? Um, no, not actually. Its not at all easy if youve never cooked a whole meal by yourself. I mean all the shopping, all the chopping, all the stuffing herby butter under the chickens skin, avoiding burns on the oven or the hot roasting tin, timing the vegetables to be cooked and done about the same time as the chickenin other words, proper cooking.

My advice then, as someone who once only knew how to make toast or the more daring sandwich or salad, but then gradually learned how to cook, is just to start cooking. Make pikelets today. Then, tomorrow, make a grilled quesadilla. In a week, bake a cake. By next month, you can serve a whole meal. True.

And that is what this book is about. Its about giving you, the discerning young eater, the mini gastronome, well-informed choices about what you eat. But this means youre doing the cooking. You can have your cake, as they say, but you have to bake it.

What you choose to eat is of course up to you. But please, please, lets not be dull. Lets be interesting about it. Lets be a bit adventurous. Lets open ourselves to a world of really good food. Here are some things you should know: