This is where I am going to start. I wasn't sure where to start really, restaurants, ingredients, chefs, methods the list goes on. I couldn't think of where could possibly be a good starting point...then it hit me. Food for me is a life within a life so why not start at it's inception. What are my earliest memories of food and eating? Where did it all begin? When did food become more than a fuel to keep my life from ebbing away. I cast my mind back to as far as I could and tried to pinpoint my earliest memories.
I have a memory in my mind of my mum baking in the kitchen with my sister and i helping out. I am not sure what we were baking but I remember enjoying the process or maybe just the outside chance i would get to lick the beaters. As a child cooking should be fun, just like playing in the sandpit. Kids are known for making mudpies in the dirt so why not get them into the kitchen where the pies will undoubtedly taste better. The next memories that came to me where of birthday parties.
Kids birthday parties are probably the first times I got really excited about food. The womens weekly cookbook provided page after page of wondrous looking cakes from tigers to castles to cake swimming pools lined with chocolate sticks and filled with jelly. My Dad dutifully recreated one of these for each of our birthdays. I remember a few memorably, namely a tip truck with a tray filled with sweets and covered in green icing. I couldn't take my eyes off it when it arrived at the table. I also remember my sister getting a shark cake for her birthday and the look on my younger sisters face was one of equal awe. The reason this one is more memorable however is that one of my sisters party guests, Louisa-Jane or some other double barreled piece of nonsense, dived at the cake as it hit the table and ripping at it she promptly broke the shark in two. The look on my sisters face was very similar to one I saw some years later when my parents forgot to bring her Christmas presents to Sydney for Christmas day, but that is another story all together.
Aside from the cakes birthday parties also boasted a myriad of other brightly coloured sugar filled goodies. Fairy bread was always a favourite, hundreds and thousands made a meal of bread and butter come to life. Jellied oranges filled kids smiles and lolly bags filled with milk bottles, freckles and Fantales were the perfect parting gift. On the savory side there were party pies and mini sausage rolls and cocktail frankfurt's also named "LBD's" or "little boy's dicks". Hardly appropriate but thoroughly amusing.
We gorged ourselves at those parties, no waiting to taste just wanting to get that sugar inside our little bodies. Pumped full of sugar we ran around like juiced up sugar junkies until all energy had been burned.
Aside from our birthday parties we were always allowed to choose what we wanted to eat on our birthday night dinner. It is amusing when I think of the choices now but we always choose simple comfort food. Spaghetti bolognaise or chilli con carne were two of my favourites. Despite all the choices we had and all the other great food my parents cooked for us all we wanted was a simple meal that we knew and loved.
Birthdays are definitely my first food memories and still today I love to go out to dinner to celebrate on my birthday although maybe this year I will go and see my parents for a home cooked spaghetti bolognaise.
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