Cooking with Rosemary Shrager |
When
Janne and I graduated and set up a home together we were still eating like
students. Although Janne had abandoned his beloved noodles and fish fingers, he
refused like a little boy to even attempt to eat vegetables. Instead we
survived on a diet of chicken dippers and oven chips or pizza and salad. Most
of our food came out of a packet or a cardboard box. But one day Janne decided
that he wanted to give me a break from heating things in the stove and decided
to cook me a lovely, romantic meal of meat balls and mashed potatoes. He spent
the entire afternoon cooking and about six hours later served up a steaming
plate of burned mince topped with the contents of a jar of pasta sauce, served
with a side of lumpy mashed potato. I ate everything! Undeterred by his first
kitchen mishap Janne tried again and this time cooked chicken coated in the
spiciest sauce ever, which was made with chilli, philadelphia cheese and
pineapple. It was wrong...so wrong, and so incredibly hot I lost the feeling in
my mouth and couldn't speak. We had fish and chips instead...from a packet.
What
I admire about Janne is he won't give up. After we found a damaged copy of
Jamie's Dinners by Jamie Oliver for free, Janne began to take a bit more
interest in good ingredients and started to follow recipes. Our first proper
meal of salmon and couscous topped with sour cream was a revelation, he cooked
it over and over and he even ate the courgettes that were a part of the recipe.
We moved on to sausage with horseradish mash topped with homemade onion gravy,
chinese stir fry with chicken, noodles and ginger and eventually we made it to
Janne creating his own recipes inspired by chefs such as, Hugh
Fearnley-Whittingstall and my hero Jamie Oliver (I love you!) I've never been
able to eat salmon and couscous since but I'm so grateful that the recipe got
us here.
Janne eats everything now and he's an amazing cook...I love his vegetable pasta with mint, basil and parsley pesto and in the winter you can't beat his meat balls with creamy mashed potato. I still can't really cook but Janne's inspired me to try. I can make soup, the best chicken pie and Jamie Oliver's fish pie. But what I have discovered is that I can do dessert and so with my husband making dinner we actually make a winning team. I love to bake and love creating my own recipes and adding my own personal touches...if I can do a bit of cake decorating too then even better!
I eat well now and I enjoy eating. In the past, I ate to live but now I realise I
wasn't living at all; I was either going to become obese or die of food
poisoning. The variety of ingredients that are out there and available to us is
immense and you can create quick, easy, healthy and delicious meals every night
of the week for very little money and time. Janne has just purchased a copy of
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstalls' Veg Everyday cook book...I never thought that I
would see the day that my husband, who just a few years ago would run out of
the room if he even saw a carrot or a stick of broccoli on the television,
would purchase a vegetarian cookbook. We've come a long way from chicken
dippers and oven chips...I don't even know what the frozen food section in a
supermarket looks like now...do they still have them? My advice to you is to
move away from the chiller cabinet and try some of our recipes...you won't find
chicken and philadelphia cheese with chilli and pineapple on here...I promise!
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