Meet the Mrs

Cooking with
 Rosemary
Shrager

Food has always been important to me and up until I moved away from home I always thought of myself as a decent cook...that was until I started to have to cook for myself and I discovered that I was rubbish. I hated cooking but loved eating and so I was very relieved when one of my house mates offered to do all of the cooking for us. All I had to do was pay him a fiver each week and he would even do the food shop too! I felt that I'd really landed on my feet here. My housemate loved to cook, but I slowly began to realise that like me, he too couldn't cook. There were five of us in the house, including Janne (which is how we met) and only two of us were willing to eat his food. Janne would cook for himself, one meal a day, and it would always be the same meal...noodles and fish fingers...which after so long started to look more appetising than the meals my housemate was serving up. But because I didn't have to cook for myself I felt that I could tolerate the French beans that shot jets of boiling hot water across the table when I bit into them, the bolognaise that arrived swimming in a pool of water and the shepherd's pie made with baked beans that had me retching in to the toilet for most of the night. The last straw came when I was served up a chicken dinner and the chicken was still bleeding. "Just bung it in the microwave for a bit!" my housemate said. "It'll be fine!" For my dinner that night I ate a bag of crisps and some instant mashed potato...it was not good and I decided that it was time to try and feed myself. My housemate seemed ok with this arrangement and so began my year long love affair with pasta and a jar of tomato sauce. When I saw him tucking into his dinner of cold hot dogs washed down with a can of condensed milk, followed by a wedge of Brie that he ate like a piece of cake, I knew that I had made the right decision.

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!