Cate Gilpin Cate Gilpin

Home cooking

Recently I received a lovely surprise in the post. It was a pot - like a cooking pot - that my Mum sent up to me…

Recently I received a lovely surprise in the post. It was a pot - like a cooking pot - that my Mum sent up to me from Melbourne. She has recently moved into a new house, and is downsizing and decluttering. This pot is something I told her years ago that I would like to inherit one day. It is a red pot with a print on the lid, and around the sides of Egyptian hieroglyphics, it is non stick (maybe enamel?) and it has metal handles.

I’m not sure where and when my parents got it, it may have been a wedding gift, and then one of the pieces that ended up in my Mum’s pile when they split up 20-odd years ago. I love it because it reminds me of my childhood. It reminds me of my Dad cooking lentil soup and pumpkin soup, or Mum making Hungarian goulash, or Osso Bucco (when people were coming for dinner), or cooking the spaghetti to have with bolognaise sauce.

I think when your parents are divorced it’s easy to only recall the negative - the arguments, the loss of the family home, and the sadness at losing your core family unit - so it’s nice to think about some of the lovely times and the things that brought us together, and food was one of those things.

We weren’t a ‘foodie’ family in the way I see other families absolutely relish food experiences together, but there were certain dishes we ate over and over again that take me back to fond moments where the four of us sat around the table and enjoyed bowls of goulash and mashed potato, or watched ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ with bowls of lentil soup and hunks of bread and butter in our laps.

This all got me thinking about our regular family meals - the meals I cook for my family (my husband and two kids) over and over again. Unfortunately my boys are still tremendously fussy eaters, meaning that most of the time they have a bento box style plate of food for dinner (meat, cut up fresh fruit and veg, rice or pasta, a piece of cheese, roasted potatoes), and I cook something different for Nick and I. The meals on regular rotation in our house are:

  • chilli (often vegetarian chilli - kidney beans, vegetables) served with rice or corn chips

  • dahl (lentil and tomato dahl) served with rice or naan bread

  • beef and vegetable stirfry

  • home made pizzas

  • basic pasta (with whatever is left in the fridge - bacon, zucchini, mushrooms, cheese) or macaroni cheese

  • minestrone soup (in winter)

  • spaghetti bolognaise

Looking at that list I still love cooking and eating all of those foods, and I’m amazed at what a range of cuisines are included in that list, it makes me reflect on how absolutely blessed we are in Australia to have such diverse food influences. I asked some of my friends what their go-to meals are and the cultural influences on their dinners was wonderfully diverse too. In fact I got a little bit inspired to expand my repertoire because they had delicious additions like spanakopita, fried rice, rice paper rolls and different curries.

I wonder as my boys move out of the phase of wanting only certain foods and join us for a standard family dinner what their favourites will be, and what they’ll recall when they’re older as the meals that brought us together, and what they will in turn cook for future partners, friends and families.

And I hope that the beautiful red pot becomes a source of lovely memories and family connection for them too.

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