NO, I'M NOT ON A DIET.

Many years (read decades) ago, when I lived in Hong Kong, an astrologer (Canadian, not Chinese - he'd come to me highly recommended) told me that, with Jupiter in my sixth house, I had a propensity to put on weight.  At the time I was by no means overweight but, at 5'4" (164cm), when I did put on weight, it showed easily.

During my adult lifetime my top weight has been 65kg (10 stone 3 pounds).  That's not including my fully pregnant weight, which topped that, but it doesn't count.  I mean, I had another person in me.  My bottom adult weight has been 50kg (8 stone).  Presently, I weigh in at 54kg and I'm happy with that.  Unlike most post-menopausal women, I have lost, rather than gained, weight.

I have never been a big eater but that's not through choice or a desire to remain thin.  It is simply because I grew up with an appalling and easily upset digestive system.  I was a reed thin child but, as adolescence crept upon me, I was deposited in a boarding school.  The school's nutritional guidelines were disturbing to say the least.  Bread with every meal and afternoon teas of cream and jam filled buns. Fat deposits began to accrue on me.  Well, obviously, I needed curves, that's the point of hormones after all, among other things.  Those other things included a severe case of cystic acne that lasted well into my twenties.

Nonetheless, I was never overweight, but was always conscious that I might become so because my mother had been thin when she married my father and, by my teen years, she was two sizes overweight.  She wasn't fat, she just wasn't thin.  I resembled her in so many ways that I decided that I would always have to watch my weight.  She also wasn't a big eater and I presumed that we both had, what is termed, a slow metabolism.

Before I fell pregnant with my son, my weight had dropped to 50kg from around 61kg when I married.  Post pregnancy I was 63kg and this weight would not shift until four years later when I was living in Hong Kong and it plummeted, for a number of reasons that I won't go into, down to 50kg again.

Fifty kilograms, for me, is not a natural weight.  I tend to look skeletal.  Nonetheless, once back in Australia I wanted to maintain my svelte appearance but, try as I may, I began to gain weight, about one kilogram (two pounds) per year.  It took ten years for me to go from 50kg to 63kg.  I was eating normally, which is to say, not much, and so I began to eat less but I still gained slowly and relentlessly.  It seemed that the astrologer was right and Jupiter had it in for me.  I had a friend at this time who was very slim and could eat two helpings of everything and not gain a thing.  I believe it comes down to genes, rather than planetary alignments, but who knows?

I discovered one very important thing from trying to stay at a weight that my body didn't approve of: the body decides our ideal weight.  It will more than happily let us go over it, but it won't let us stay under it.  It would rather we gained fat in case of a famine and, for the same reason, will make us gain if we fall below a certain level where our fat deposits won't sustain us in a crisis.  At least, that's my theory.

I think it comes down to the fact that, throughout most of human history, we have not had food readily available to us.  Only in the last ten thousand or so years have we become agrarian and it's only in the last hundred or so years with the Industrial Revolution, mass global transport and trade, that most of humanity has been assured of food.

There are exceptions of course.  Wars and civil wars, including tribal wars in Africa, even more than drought, are usually responsible for food shortages in these food abundant days.  Our bodies genetic coding, however, is based on hundreds of thousands of years of the human experience and has programmed us to survive, even prepare for, periods without adequate sustenance.  Our brains also aid in this survival mechanism and make us crave fattening foodstuffs that have allowed food chains such as McDonald's, Haagen Daz, Pizza Hut, Dunking Donuts right down to your local fish and chip shops and greasy cafes to pander to your starvation avoiding whims.

What a pity our genetic coding doesn't instill a loathing of war in us as well.  Unfortunately, war probably arose out of skirmishes between people over food and hunting grounds and may be coded into us as well.  We haven't outgrown what was once a survival mechanism.

I eat less than most people do.  I do not exaggerate.  I am known for it in my family and by our friends to whom it's a bit of a joke.  I used to be able to eat more, when I was younger, although not much.  I watch with barely concealed envy as my daughter-in-law and her mother (both normal sized women) make scones for afternoon tea with an assortment of jams and cream and eat them with my grandchildren.  If I attempted the same, I would not be able to eat any dinner.  When my partner has our friends to lunch, he will also bring out a dessert of some sort that they will scoff down joyfully.  I watch in dismay and take a bite from my partner's plate just to get a taste.

My stomach has been my dictator since I was five years of age.  After what it put me through in my youth due to lactose intolerance and whatever else upset it, I do not test its limits.  It simply isn't worth it.  How I would trade with someone else for a day just to know the pleasure of eating a decent size meal followed by cheesecake or some such, let alone to be able to consume same with a milkshake or frosty shake.  However, it's just not even on the cards.  I don't even want to think where that would take me.

I'm sure you're not feeling sorry for me.  Most people would like to be able to curb their appetites at will but, if you have to sit at a table and watch your lunch companions eating a whole roll each, perhaps two, filled with ham, cheese, salads, mayonnaise etc., and you literally can only consume a third of what they're having without getting a stomach ache, it is just plain sad.  It is only since menopause that my usual small portions have not been responsible for me slowly gaining weight, as I did in those ten years when I was younger and tried to stay underweight.

I envy people who can go to an 'all you can eat' buffet and get their money's worth.  I am a huge devotee of the doggy bag when I go to a restaurant.  When I asked for one at a restaurant when I was first dating my partner, he was appalled but he came to understand that it's only fair considering my inability to eat enough.  I also can't eat too quickly and so, taking a doggy bag home, means I can enjoy what I couldn't eat in one go, later on.

Friends are now telling me my face is too thin.  This is the result of ageing and fat deserting my face.  Unfortunately, you can't stick fat back where you want it.  It has to be applied all over unless you have the money for a plastic surgeon to place it artfully where it is needed.  I'm not about to try eating enough to fill out my cheeks and couldn't even if I wanted to.

So, to end this blog, my advice to those of you who can eat well is, enjoy.  If you need to diet, don't do crash diets.  They just confuse the body because it thinks it's in a famine and you'll just end up programming it to gain.  The best way to control your intake is long term discipline, something I've had to acquire thanks to my temperamental tummy.  You don't have to starve yourself thin.  Go about it slowly and don't develop an, "I'll binge now and diet", later mentality.  Discover your body's ideal weight and work at keeping it.  It's also silly to say that any particular food is bad for you or fattening.  It's really all about how much of it you eat.

END

CAFES: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GRILLED HAM, CHEESE AND TOMATO ON TOAST?

Credit: Andrewgen, iStock

 

Here I go again.  Yes, I've waffled on about restaurants before but there is no limit to my disappointment and the amount of complaining I can manage.  I don't think it's because I'm old(ish), I think it's because cafes, especially after surviving during Covid, don't want to take chances and they all offer the same menu choices in order to compete with other surviving cafes.

Smashed Avocado on Sourdough Toast topped with Feta and, sometimes, a poached egg, is a delicious breakfast or lunch.  It has, however, become 'de rigeur' in almost every cafe.  That's fine if you can handle sawing apart toasted sourdough.  I've given up and just pick it up in my hands.  If you've read some of my other posts, you'll know I have Essential Tremor in my hands, making eating in a restaurant akin to frisbee throwing, that is, for my nearby neighbours.  It is best if I eat with my hands.  That, however, is not why I complain about the sameness of cafe menus.

Although cafes offer a plethora of breakfast and lunch menu options, there is a noticeable absence of some good old staples.  I suspect that if a cafe offered these, they would be considered below standard, a laughingstock or drummed out of the corps.  I refer to the simple dish of open faced, grilled cheese and tomato on toast, perhaps with ham, or even a toasted croissant with the same ingredients.  By toast, I mean the stuff that comes out of supermarket packet.  I don't buy such for home use, but it is much easier to cut with a knife than toasted sourdough.  You can also make two vertical cuts and have three nice strips to eat by hand for those of us with questionable hand movements.

So many things have improved in what is available in supermarkets, but other, simple things have faded into obsolescence.  Previously I have bemoaned the disappearance of Chicken Maryland and Steak Diane in restaurants, although some steak restaurants will offer steaks with your choice of sauces.  A couple of years ago I went with a friend to a steak restaurant at the Gold Coast.  You almost needed to take your bank manager with you to afford a steak.  I ordered prawns, not to be cheap, but because I love them.  They came cooked in their shells.  I have never experienced such a messy meal with so little to show for it.  If the place was that expensive, they may at least have peeled them, plus add a dozen more so I didn't leave needing a Macdonald's hamburger.

I honestly feel that I haven't had a decent meal since I lived in Hong Kong forty years ago.  I recently had a Chinese meal that my friend and I picked up for dinner.  We've used the restaurant many times and it is adequate.  This time it sadly disappointed.  Maybe the usual chef was away or had simply given up all hope.  Chinese is expensive these days and, recently, I have learned to cook a really good Chinese chicken stir fry.  It is so good, the takeaway meal paled by comparison.  What's wrong with that, you ask?  It's because I'm tired of cooking and, it seems, I cannot go out and find a meal equal to anything I cook at home.

There is only so much pizza, cooked chicken or hamburgers I can stomach for takeout.  I need someone who can cook like me, but instead of me.  I'm so tired of trying to figure out what to do with the corpses of cows, chicken, pigs or poor lambs.  I feel guilty enough eating them without having to ponder over what to do with their dead flesh.

I have wandered off the theme of this post, but it sent me down a perilous road of disappointing eating out and takeout experiences.  The man in my life actually gets cross if I ask him what he'd like for dinner.  After all, it's such hard work to decide.  I remind him that he doesn't actually have to go out, find an animal, kill it and bring it home.  All he has to do is eat it.  If you haven't cooked nearly every darned day of your life, I guess having to make a decision about food must be extremely tedious.

END

FUSSY EATERS: the bane of a cook's existence.

 

I remember not being a particularly fussy eater as a child.  I believe the only problem with me was that I didn't eat much.  This may have been because I wasn't very well until I was about five years of age.  After my antrums were drained my health was restored but, judging from childhood photos, I remained a string bean.  Boarding school made me a fussier eater but hunger drove me to eat all but the most gross offerings.  These included beetroot and junket.  To this day I can't stand either.  I gave beetroot a good try when it was served with salad three days in a row at lunch.  I forced it down the first two but on the third I gagged too much and gave up.

I hadn't run into a fussy eater until my son came along.  As a baby he was just so easy care he was a dream and remained that way in all but one respect.  He was a fussy eater.  Once he went onto solids there was a repertoire of foods he would stick to and from which he would not vary.  These were: eggs, sausages, fish fingers, corn on the cob, salami, cheese, noodles, bananas, ice cream and spaghetti without sauce.  He did eat cereal with milk and may have eaten toast, I can't remember.  Straying outside these lines just wasn't worth it as he would just stubbornly refuse to open his mouth.  I told my doctor about it and he said that my son was getting enough protein and sustenance and not to worry.

I would give my son his dinner early when he was young and cook for my husband and I and we would eat later.  Eventually son developed a liking for my Spaghetti Bolognese, a passion he retains to this day now he and his wife make it.  We lived in Hong Kong when he was between the ages of two and five and a half.  We would take him with us to restaurants and one of my favourite memories is of watching him eat a bowl of noodles with chopsticks.  His head would be just above table height and he would use two hands to stick the chopsticks into the bowl then bring the sticks together and grip them in one hand, raise them up high with their clump of noodles, bend his head to the side and then lower the noodles into his mouth.  He enjoyed doing this and didn't want help.  To me it remains a sign of his tremendous self reliance that has endured and I admire to this day.

I remember being five years old and having breakfast with my parents.  My mother, father and I would sit at the dining table and eat poached eggs on toast.  I used to have cloudy apple juice to drink with mine.  I would watch fascinated as Dad would cut the egg that sat atop his toast into nine squares by slicing two lines one way and another two the other way.  This left the nice, soft, runny yolk sitting on the middle square and that was the best bit.  He always did it this way and for years I did too.  Over time, however, I realised that to get some yolk with the other parts of the egg I had to be less tidy and after that I carved mine up so I can get some in every mouth full but I am still nostalgic for Dad's method.

As I grew older my father would become very frustrated watching me eat a roast dinner accompanied by vegetables.  Dad would put meat with gravy on his fork, add potato, pumpkin or whatever and then squeeze some peas on it as well.  I ate everything separately.  One night he took my fork over and made a compilation and asked me to try it.  I did and went straight back to eating everything separately.  Mum told him not to worry.  Eventually I ate the way of adults.  It all comes around in the end.

This brings me back to son.  There is something particularly galling about trying to encourage your teenage child to try some salad with dinner.  Once he began to eat the same meals as we did, I would put out salad with certain dishes like spaghetti or steaks and urge him to try.  I gave up pretty quickly and the salad remained untouched by him for years until one day when he was about fifteen.  We were eating and, all of a sudden, son puts some salad on his plate and, lo and behold, begins to actually eat it.  I gazed at him in wonder and said, "And when did you start to eat salad?"

"Oh, I tried it at a so and so's place," he replied.  I can't remember his friend's name now, hence the 'so and so'.  I was pleased I suppose, but also a bit miffed.  What had so and so's mother or father done to make salad so appealing?  My thought is, however, that it wasn't the appealing look of the salad but the fact that another teenage boy was eating it.  I think that was why he deigned to try it or was shamed into it and then discovered that he liked it.

The worst experience his father and I had making him eat was on our return journey from living in Hong Kong when he was five and a half.  We arrived in Perth, Western Australia on a weekend.  Now Perth was a bit backward about opening anything on weekends and that meant we had to rely totally on the kitchen of our upmarket hotel to feed us.  I think the chef was deeply insulted at having to create dishes for our son that were to be delivered to our room.  In fact we didn't want him to create anything.  When we ordered an apple and some cheese that's all we wanted but, not only did it take an hour but what arrived was a cored apple with cheese grilled in the centre.  Guess who wouldn't touch it?  We sent a message: simple please, no embellishments.  Next time we ordered a bowl of spaghetti noodles.  Please don't add anything.  Either the chef was brain dead or toying with us.  He melted butter over it and then ground fresh parsley on the top.  Again son starved as he wouldn't touch it.  I think he survived on milk the entire weekend.  There was simply not a shop open where we could buy him anything.

I also spent years trying to get him to spell properly.  You know how parents have to go through the spelling exercise at night with their children on the words they are learning that week.  This went on into high school and, brilliant as son was in most subjects, his spelling was never perfect until year four of high school and then suddenly it was.  I will add here that I was a brilliant speller from the get go.  Son, however, was like a chrysalis in regard to things such as food and spelling.  At some stage he just emerged from the pupa and did it properly.  Actually I think he just made the decision to do so and before that happened he just went with the flow.

Having a child is like being handed a self drive car that comes with absolutely no instructions and is designed to be self autonomous and take no passengers.  First you have to figure out what fuel it takes, and it spits quite a few types out, then you must maintain it until it can start its own motor and begin to steer itself.  Having then put your heart and soul into looking after it until it reaches self sufficiency, you then watch it putt putt off into the distance and hope it comes back to visit.

Of course it's not just children that sometimes prove difficult to feed.  My ex husband had a grandfather who used to demand a roast lamb dinner every night of his married life from his long suffering wife.  Apparently he put her in a mental home for a few years but she eventually returned home.  He was eccentric and my guess is that he had driven her to a nervous breakdown.  It's not always the nuts who end up in the nut house.

I live with a Polish man and have for many years.  He is lovely in so many ways and so utterly perverse in others.  So many meals I used to make are now off the menu as he simply refuses to eat them.  I ask him what his ex wife used to cook and tell him to get the recipes.  But it's not just that.  In his world and his past he could open the refrigerator door and find all manner of goodies to eat.  You know, pre-cooked meals and so forth as well as smoked meats, sausages and cheeses.  It never occurs to him that food goes off and also that it costs money.  My fridge always has the necessities but I'm not going to keep it fully stocked with different meals to fancy someone's hunger pangs at any hour of the day or night.  When I dare to ask him in the morning what he wants for dinner so I can get something out of the freezer to cook he grumbles.  I then tell him that he's lucky he doesn't have to go out and hunt for something to bring back to cook.

As for Polish food, some is good and a lot of it is not.  I recall a meal at his friend's house that began with an entree made up of a boiled egg around which was wrapped a herring, both of which sat on a potato, carrot and pea salad in mayonnaise.  As for Bigos, well it's basically a hunting stew that, in the past, you would keep adding to as time went by.  Modern versions have smoked sausages, pork and I honestly don't know what else but it always tastes distinctly suspect to me.  My partner will bring things home from his ex's house that she has kindly cooked.  We all get on famously.  I love her pirozhki and some of her desserts but some things I leave to him to consume and there is always so much.

He also loathes lamb.  I think they used to get mutton in Poland that wasn't very good when he was growing up and nothing will make him eat it.  There is also one other thing I simply can't get him to try and that is a prawn.  I don't much like fish but I love crustaceans.  A prawn does not taste like fish but he just says they are the cockroach of the deep and won't touch them.  I love lobster too but when I realise some are boiled alive, I'd have to be pretty sure they were killed humanely.  Even so they can live to be one hundred and I would just feel like a spoilsport if my desiring to eat one cut short a long life.

My partner also just goes off things at a whim.  One moment he'll like my curry, the next he won't.  I make a pretty mean Chili con Carne but, no, it's too spicy and besides, like Bolognese, there's tomato in it.  He hates tomato in cooked dishes and there aren't many stews and sauces that don't have it.  My one staple for him, pork rissoles, he decided the other day I was making too thick so he formed the patties next time I made them.  They were just as thick but smaller in diameter.

Now I come to my grandchildren.  The eldest boy lives on not much but noodles and wraps, sometimes with chicken in them.  Oddly they all love my Spinach Pie.  Granddaughter likes Taco boats with sour cream and she also likes noodles.  Youngest grandson isn't picky yet but I'll bet you anything he'll like noodles too.  The Chinese really came up with a winner there.

Children usually grow out of their choosiness but I am blessed with an adult who is like a child but he makes up for it in other ways.  Aren't we lucky to be able to be so choosy?  Imagine if we had to hunt and grow things to eat to survive without any farmers or supermarkets to help us.  Also imagine the time when humans ate what they caught raw.  Apparently cooking food led to us being smarter but what on earth made us so picky when we have so much choice?

END

 

 

THE WORST RESTAURANT EXPERIENCE I'VE EVER HAD.

Gaddi's at the Peninsula Hotel, Hong Kong

 

 

 

Imagine if you will a Basil Fawlty type dinner experience, but up the ante and place it in the most exclusive restaurant in the most upmarket hotel in Hong Kong.  The decade was the eighties and being an expatriate there at the time was akin to living in the pages of a Jackie Collins novel.

A year or so after our arrival in Hong Kong in 1981 my husband and I decided to take courage in hand and reserve a table for two at Gaddi's in the Peninsula Hotel. I can't remember our reason but it was probably for a special occasion.  The maitre d'hotel there was almost as famous as the restaurant itself.  I shall, in the interests of diplomacy, not name him.

It was well known that he took bribes to sit people at the best tables.  It was, in fact, considered de rigueur to do so.  A neighbour of ours at the time, a Swiss chef, who ran an exclusive club in Hong Kong, had worked at Gaddi's previously.  He knew the insufferable maitre d' and of his reputation.  He had seen it first hand. 

Yours truly was rather attractive at the time and dabbling in modelling.  I mention this as it may go some way to explain the dinner from hell.  The maitre d' was gay and not your usual affable gay, but your vicious bitch kind.  He made a fortune from 'tips'.  His apartment, once displayed in a magazine, was testament to this.  We had chosen a week night to go and were surprised to find the tables almost empty.  Perhaps the jet set ate later but in the hour that we were there only one other couple arrived.  It was after seven pm and so not really early.

We had dressed well, didn't smell and knew how to behave.  There was scarcely need to offer a bribe as there was no competition for seating.  We were placed at a table near the centre of the room which was fine.  You would think a maitre d' of reputation would delight in giving a young couple prepared to spend at such an exclusive restaurant a good experience.  Nyet.

We ordered a bottle of red, French if I remember rightly.  It came as we perused the menu.  We weren't offered any suggestions but left to our own devices.  We took time to study it.  We decided against an entree and decided on mains, perhaps to be followed by dessert.  I had once had pigeon and, as it was offered, chose that.  I forget entirely what my husband ordered as the shock of what followed has erased it from my memory.

When you order pigeon you assume, as it is small, you will get at least a quarter of the bird. We also assumed the meals would come with vegetables if a hot meal, a salad if a pasta or cold one.  The menu offered no suggestions for vegetables or salad and the maitre d' offered no advice.

Some forty minutes or so later our meals arrived.  The plates were large, our meals were not.  On my plate, all alone, was one pigeon drumstick and nothing else.  No thigh was attached to it.  My husband's meal was slightly larger given that nothing could be smaller than a pigeon leg.  It was, however, also very small.  We waited as we assumed the vegetables would come shortly.  After ten minutes we attracted the attention of the maitre d'.

Where, perchance, were the vegetables?

With a haughtiness befitting such a beast he simply told us that we hadn't ordered any.  He may as well have dropped a lead brick on the table.  We were absolutely stunned.  He offered no apology, no excuse and didn't offer to have some made in a hurry.    There was no suggestion on the menu that we should choose vegetables separately nor do I recall they were listed at all.  The maitre d' had not told us, as one should, what the vegetables of the day were when we ordered.  We expected, in such a place, to be looked after, not treated like hillbillies.

He went away.  We came around from our shock and decided what to do.  Without eating we asked for the bill.  We paid only for the wine and left.  No one chased us demanding more money.  Had they tried my husband might have given them a fist sandwich.  What should have been a special night was rendered a huge disappointment.  After all these years I still wonder at the maitre d's motive.  Had there been more people there to see what happened would he have tried this on two young people?  It was an attempt to belittle us, however, he only made himself look small.

Was he jealous that he was not an attractive young female like me?  Did he get up on the wrong side of the bed?  I know he was playing some kind of nasty game.  We weren't the well known set of Hong Kong but how often would they go there?  The place is an hotel and tourists went there constantly.  He had no one else to cater to that evening so he could have made it a memorable experience for us.  He obviously was not afraid of the Peninsula receiving a complaint.  He managed to keep that position for another sixteen years.  I can imagine that he took his personal venom out on others as well as the mood took him.

It's funny how a bad experience will stay in your mind.  Had the evening been good I may have forgotten it or remembered it vaguely with nostalgia.  One of the great things about Hong Kong is its fabulous food, not only Chinese but all the International cuisines.  It is home to some of the best chefs in the world and the produce comes from all over the globe.  It has provided me, apart from the experience at Gaddi's, with my best restaurant and food memories.  In fact I haven't enjoyed food since as much as I did there.

The mystery remains, however, as to why our night there was spoiled by the sniveling snake of a maitre d'.  Our chef neighbour was not surprised when he heard.  He said the man was one of the reasons he left the restaurant in spite of its prestige.

THE END



 

LIFE RECIPE.

Boarding School Fare - a snail in the spinach

   

Cooking seems to be a very popular subject on television right now.  Women's magazines have always included recipe sections and now there are shows like Masterchef, My Kitchen Rules and numerous others.

I've been cooking since my mother decided I should help out in the kitchen.  She didn't know how to cook when she married but she soon learned how to with a vengeance.  In my years at home I never saw a sausage or mashed potato grace our dinner table.  She bought meat weekly from the butcher and ordered exactly the cuts she wanted.

Our steaks always came from scotch fillets and she would roast whole ones as well.  Chicken could  be roasts or so many different casseroles it would make a hen's breast puff with pride.  I grew up in Sydney and my mother made things that I later discovered hadn't been heard of in some other states until thirty years later.  Brisbane was particularly backward cuisine wise and had not heard of cheesecake until the 1970's I believe.  When I arrived there in 1991 I couldn't find brown bread anywhere.  It was like landing in a time warp.

Part of the reason for my mother's success was that my father grew up next door to a French family.  One of the daughters of the household, who was my father's age, became my Godmother.  Her mother, who was always referred to as Madame, shared her French recipes with the younger generation.  My mother's recipe book is full of typed pages in a ring binder.  She gives credit for every recipe in it.  'Madame' is listed under many of the desserts.

No matter how hard I try I can never compete with my mother's cooking.  Some people have 'the gift' and she did.  My ex-husband, blast his hide, also has 'the gift'.  His second wife was double-blessed with it.  When we were still married my husband was an absolute boon when we gave a dinner party.  He would also get all the credit even though I did all the preparation.  For some reason I have always been commended on my salads and, oddly, sandwiches.  I mean any idiot can make these.  Perhaps it is my gift.

There was one little problem, however, with my husband's technique.  While my mother washed every pan after she used it, my husband used every pan in the kitchen and let them pile up in the sink to skyscraper level.  In the open plan kitchen-dining rooms of today guests can see the gargantuan mess so I had to clean the lot up before they arrived.  I would end up a mass of perspiration and just have time to put on my make-up which slid immediately off my face.

I remember a Christmas we spent at my parents' place.  My husband insisted on glazing a ham.  My mother did not like anyone in her kitchen at all.  The trouble with kitchens is that everyone loves to congregate in them.  In the home in which I grew up, the kitchen had a door to the outside and one to our hallway.  It was small to say the least and a thoroughfare into the bargain.

These days kitchens are open plan and attached to a family room.  That solves this age old problem but no kitchen on earth would have been big enough for my mother.  My parents had moved to another state and a house with a much bigger kitchen by the time we celebrated the Christmas in question.

Even so I watched as my mother succumbed to one of her mini nervous breakdowns as my husband entered the kitchen every twenty minutes to glaze the ham.  Mother had these breakdowns on a regular basis.  I'm sure the reason I was turfed off to boarding school at the age of ten was because my mother couldn't cope with her only child, who did everything to please her, taking up space in the house.

Perhaps I should be grateful but at boarding school I suffered through eight years of the most appalling food imaginable.  At school it was possible to leave a fork in the bowl in which the sausages had arrived at a refectory table, pick it up when the fat had set and the bowl come with it.  The delights of afternoon tea were enjoyed all over again when their leftovers from the four previous days turned up in green jelly and opaque pink custard as a trifle for dessert.

At a previous school there was also the mashed pumpkin that was watery mush and had pieces of pumpkin skin left in it.  We named these bits Sister Katherine's fingernails after the woman who prepared it.  It made us gag.  Another treat was the added protein of tiny snails that remained in the spinach and had clung stubbornly on during the washing of the leaves.

I came home from school on Friday nights.  I would have looked forward to this but instead dreaded the meal.  This was because my dear father was a devout Catholic.  My mother was Church of England in name only and not religious in any sense, but she would cook Friday meals according to the Catholic directive of the time.

She would rub this in as she picked me up on Friday afternoon.

"We're having your favourite tonight," she would say.  This was either delusion or downright mean.  "Smoked fish mornay."

I hated that dish.  I repeatedly told her so and I don't know if she kept forgetting or it was dad's favourite and she got us mixed up.  I hate fish period, but smoked, orange skinned fish in a cheese sauce was almost enough to make me jump out of the car and go back to school.

The real treat was her Sour Cherry Pie.  She refused to write the recipe down and when I asked for it years later she had forgotten how she did it.  I said I'd try to make it and she gave me a vague guide.  I never tried to follow her instructions.  I just wasn't going to ruin perfection.

Mum was an innovative cook as well.  She would prepare well ahead and freeze meals so she could always cater for visitors.  On weekends our house was often full of friends and family.  On one of these occasions I must have been out with my future husband and came home to a house full of people.  Everyone was in our very large living room eating fork food from a plate.  It turned out it was a Spinach Pie.

Given my memory of spinach from school I point blank refused to try it even though everyone exhorted me to do so.  It was delicious they said.  After ten minutes I gave in and said I'd try a bite.

I never looked back and the recipe has become one of my favourites.  It is called French Onion Tart of all things.  The French Onion part comes from the addition of a packet of dry French Onion soup to the ingredients.  The actual pie is packed to the gunnels with chopped spinach, three eggs, ham, cheddar and some cream, to which I'm usually allergic, but it's cooked to the point that it doesn't upset me.

Once I would buy spinach leaves, wash and finely chop these in a blender then drain the liquid.  Now it's available, I just buy the finely chopped frozen kind making the dish so much easier.  It's placed in a shortcrust pie crust, which I also used to make, but now just buy, then sprinkled with more cheese and baked in a Pyrex pie dish.

On one occasion I spent a good part of the day making this dish for a couple who were coming to dinner.  All went fine and it was cooked to perfection.  I don't know what I had previously cooked on a hot plate but I forgot it was still hot.  I took the pie out of the oven and gently placed it on the hotplate that I thought was cool.  A few seconds later came the sound of an explosion.  Pie and Pyrex went everywhere.

We bought Kentucky Fried and cleaned up the kitchen.  I have never put anything on a hotplate since before checking the temperature.  It also isn't wise to put a hot Pyrex dish in the sink and run water over it.  I tend to think Pyrex can handle anything but it doesn't tolerate fools.

One of my mother's other great recipes is Madame's Chocolate Mousse.  Real French Chocolate Mousse has no cream in it.  The cream is added, whipped, as a side dish.  Only cheats put cream in a true Chocolate Mousse.  I should admit that I am lactose intolerant and the only cream I can tolerate has been cooked to a temperature where it has broken down such as in the Spinach Pie.

My mother also made beautiful lamb stews but pork was never her favourite.  Pork was once the most expensive meat to buy in Australia but she also found it too dry to casserole although we did occasionally have pork roasts.

My mother kept her appetite for food for her lifetime and was still enjoying food when she lived in a nursing home.  I am sadly losing my appetite.  I am still young but can eat only a little.  I must have a very slow metabolism.  In fact it is probably very efficient but dulls my interest in food.  It simply isn't worth going to a restaurant now.  The most I can consume is an entrée and that's it.

This year I went to my son's place for Christmas.  I was invited for an early dinner.  In the late afternoon the table was spread with dips and snacks.  Everyone ate with gay abandon except me.  I didn't eat, saving for dinner which came three hours later.  I told my son to only invite me for one meal at any time.

I remember a delightful, birdlike, old lady at my mother's nursing home looking at her Christmas lunch.  She said: "I don't even want to eat anymore."  It is tragic to run out of appetite before you die.  In old age, if there is nothing left to you, no sex, no travel, no independence, at least there is food.  It is the final affront not to be able to enjoy what is so life giving.

There are people in the world without enough to eat and sadly there are people who, with food available to them, simply can't eat anymore.  Food is one of life's great pleasures as well as vital to sustain life.  It is wonderful to think that something so necessary can also give such pleasure.

I am also impressed by the fact that humans have turned food into an art form.  It began with subsistence and, when we found a way to store food and have plenty, it became a source of creativity.  We humans are an interesting lot in that we apply art to what is necessary and basic.

Imagine if we had to thresh the wheat, milk a cow to make butter, grow sugar cane and reduce it to sugar grains, raise hens for eggs, just to make a cake.  Cooking shows how far we have come in the sense of how we gather and store foodstuffs.  It is not trivial.  It is a tribute to human ingenuity.

You know how it feels when the electricity goes off and we are plunged into darkness?  We are lost for anything to do.   There are no woodstoves to cook on.  People used to read by candlelight or go to bed.  Life revolved around the sun and fire.  Growing and gathering the ingredients to cook a meal is no mean feat.  A simple recipe requires ingredients from an extraordinary number of sources.

When man was in his infancy he hunted for meat, killed it and ate it raw.  He may have supplemented this with the fruit and berries.  Wheat was a long time coming.  So was sugar; thousands of years in fact.

Next time you make a recipe, consider where the ingredients come from and wonder at how far the human being has come in gathering food for survival.  For something this vital to be raised to an art form is tribute to how well humans have not only adapted to survival but stated in no uncertain terms: we can go one better.  We have enough to make food flavoursome and interesting.

Wouldn't it be a shame if recipes became a sign of the lack of foresight of the human condition?  If, when the world's population reached the level where there is mass starvation, the idea of a recipe may become tribute to the lack of thought about sustaining the future?  As if it was the equivalent of: "Let them eat cake".

I like to see the human race as having the common sense to ensure its survival.  This is going to require a recipe with a whole different set of ingredients but I'm sure we're up to it.  We just need to harvest a few more of our brain cells and add them to the mix and then survival will be assured.

END