Sunday March 21, 2010
Desperate dad cooking tips
STRAY THOUGHTS By A .ASOHAN
Single fathers who are lousy cooks, help is on the way!
A COUPLE of weeks ago, in a moment of madness that lasted several hours, I posted some cooking tips for single fathers on social media and micro-blogging site Twitter.com.
Somebody there suggested I write a cookbook. That requires actual effort, something that single fathers can barely spare the time for – especially when they are lazy like me – so I’ve decided to take the easy way out and elaborate on the tips here in my column.
The decision was also reinforced by the fact that the number of cooking tips I know can barely fill a page, let alone a book, but let’s not belabour the point, eh?
These tips will help you prepare delicious and nutritious meals for the little devils ... er, I mean little ones.
They will be especially helpful if you’ve never held a wok before – indeed, more so if you don’t even know what a wok is – because men who can actually cook would be struggling too much not to laugh or scoff to be able to concentrate. (For example, at this stage, a cooking show host would have said something droll like, “Let’s work that wok, boys!”)
These tips will not be very useful either for men who watch the Asian Food Channel, or who know the variant names of the humble eggplant (aubergine, brinjal, melongene – I know! I looked it up!).
When you’re a single father cooking for your children, it’s going to be pasta, curry or burgers.
·Libations: Unlike men who like cooking, you have to determine what kind of drinks you will need to expel as much of the dreariness of cooking as possible. Indeed, some over-indulgence here may even lead to you enjoying the whole thing. It’s a delicate balance, so beware.
The choice of what to drink while cooking is important. It’s wine for pasta, and beer for burgers and curry.
The type of wine depends on what kind of pasta sauce you’re making. Remember, it’s red for tomato-based sauces like bolognaise and white for the creamy stuff like carbonara.
White wine also goes with sauceless pasta dishes like aglio olio, where you fry up pasta with a bunch of stuff in – you guessed it! – a wok.
If you cannot remember such complicated combinations, just remember this: The colours must be coordinated.
When it comes to pasta sauces, when the kids are not looking (a “hey, looky there” directed away from the stove sometimes works), you might want to drop a squirt of red wine into the tomato-based sauce or white wine into the carbonara-like sauce just before it’s fully cooked.
If you’re especially ambitious and masochistic, and have decided to cook something other than pasta, curry or burgers, then you will need a stiff drink: tequila, whiskey or rum will do.
·Butter it up: Everything – and I do mean everything – tastes better with butter. Except curry.
Okay, everything other than curry tastes better with butter.
·Pasta tips: If you’re making a tomato-based pasta sauce, first open that jar you bought from the supermarket. Let it sit for a while as you make the other preparations.
Now dice up a lot of garlic. Remember, this is an Italian dish, so there’s no such thing as too much garlic.
Drop a dollop of butter – remember, there’s no such thing as too much butter – into a deep pan, put it on the stove over a medium-low flame and, just before the butter completely melts, add olive oil. As the oil heats up, drop two or three chopped up chilli padi. This gives your sauce a tangy taste. When the oil-butter mix starts to bristle (or whatever the technical term is), add the garlic – as with butter, there’s no such thing as too much.
When the garlic starts to turn golden, add the ground beef if you’re using any. As it starts to sizzle, add four or five halved baby tomatoes or one tomato cut into eight wedges. This offsets the chilli taste.
Once the tomato starts to soften, you can start adding the oregano and “stuff” (see below), and when the meat is cooked, the ready-made sauce. From the jar. That you bought from a supermarket.
Liven up the whole experience by getting the kids to sing, “Papa makes the best pasta” or healthy, family-centric activities like that.
·Stuff: “Stuff” is an all-encompassing, technical term for all the herbs and spices whose name you can’t remember.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with stuff, in either your curry or pasta sauce. Curry is more forgiving of such wild abandon. Just do so with judicious amounts. If it all goes wrong, tell the kids the meat was bad.
You can cook corned beef the same way. Corned beef hash is an unholy mess anyway, so don’t be too afraid to experiment with sauces and stuff. These include HP Sauce, Lea & Perrins, grated cheese, chilli powder, etc – just make sure not to use too much of any one thing.
If you’re going for a more Westernised hash to be spread on bread, use more grated cheese. For the Asian version to be eaten with rice, use sliced green chilli and more of those small reddish onions whose actual name I can’t remember. (They may be called shallots, but that creates images of crustaceans in my mind, so I may be completely off the mark here.)
·Onions and weird stuff: Yeah, the stuff that’s neither meat nor vegetable. Here’s a tip: Keep your onions refrigerated. Not only do they keep longer this way, they also cause fewer tears when you cut them.
(Note: The “your onions” above was not a euphemism for anything else!)
Of course, macho men do not need to worry about their eyes tearing, ‘cos we all know that real men don’t cry.
Rule of thumb: Diced onions for curry and pasta sauces, sliced for vegetable dishes.
Another rule of thumb: Rules are made to be broken.
·Burgers: Thawing meat using the microwave oven is the last resort of a desperate man – don’t tell anybody you do it.
If you want the best burgers, you have to make your own patties. This means marinating the ground beef overnight with a beer-based do-it-yourself Canadian sauce.
But you’re cooking for your kids. They don’t need cordon bleu burgers. Ramly’s patties will do just fine.
·Kids in the kitchen: Safety should be paramount in your mind at all times, but it’s also good to get the kids to help out. You know, teach them responsibility and stuff (“stuff” used here in the non-spice context). All for noble, parenting reasons, of course.
The kids will want to cut up stuff. Say “No” and make them do all the washing up instead.
Remember, kids will always want to help out with chores unless they’re old enough to actually do them.
·And finally....: Always make sure you have a good exit strategy. McDonald’s, Domino’s, Canadian Pizza, any delivery service will do at a pinch. Make sure their numbers are on speed dial.
■ A. Asohan, Digital News Editor at The Star, will one day add to his culinary repertoire. Then again, perhaps not.
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