Or rather I should say, it's made me look at food with a whole new level of appreciation.
And that's saying a lot, and a lot, and a lot, given how much I already love my food.
The kids on Junior Masterchef are amazingly talented. They're only wee (8-12), and are all incredible cooks. What I admire is how they never say no, or get defeated. They're always willing to try. They gamely try anything new, even if it urks them, and whip up gorgeous dishes of things they've never had.
They've definitely inspired me, not just with food, but on my general outlook of life. Starting with food, of course.
Last Friday I decided to attempt one of the recipes from Sophia (age 12, from Queensland).
A homemade ravioli with prawn mousse, and a tomato vierge sauce.
I've never made pasta in my life, but I figured, how hard could it be! Especially when the recipe only called for eggs, olive oil and flour.
I didn't have a pasta roller, but I had boo and a rolling pin.
And so we got to it.
He was all eager beaver about getting his hands in the 'fun stuff', and didn't want to do the 'boring stuff' like chop garlic. So I let him.
My theory is that he made a mess of it with his lousy squishing technique, which is how we ended up with too-tough pasta - but still yummy, for a first attempt.
After the squishing, we set up a factory line between the two of us.
He to roll and cut with a little sauce dish, and me to fill it with the prawn mousse.
It didn't take us long to realise how hard it was to roll the dough out nice and thin with a rolling pin.
So we started with one vaguely wanton (as in dumpling, not slutty) looking ravioli, which then evolved into ravioli of all shapes and sizes because we got lazy with cutting it nice and equal. We even had some wee ones from the scraps of dough and christened them wavioli - as in wee ravioli.
We got to about 18 pieces and I decided that was enough.
I dunked them in some boiling salted water, drizzled the vierge sauce over it and tada. Dinner!
I have a theory that all recipes lie, or at least omit certain truths and I'm on a quest to prove it.
Recipes should be written without the assumption that you 'get it'. There's no reason amateur cooks like myself should be excluded just because someone decided to cut a few corners in typing out the recipe. Perhaps the addition of certain information made the line breaks look ugly, or wouldn't fit neatly on the page. Whatever the case, I'd like to put together a dummy-proof recipe, with instructions like they should be.
Yup.
