Cooking? Now I’m Homesick

The biggest thing I miss from home?

Cooking.

I was a cooking show fiend back in Australia. I devoured Masterchef, My Kitchen Rules, Iron Chef, Heston’s shows, Nigella shows, Top Chef, and of course, all of those shows that concentrated on cooking organic, gourmet, English produce set in a a quaint farmhouse. Argh, I loved them all.

In the past three weeks that I’ve been housebound, on account of the legs being burnt, I’ve had the chance to not only catch up on re-runs of Sex and the City, The Real Housewives of New York City, and my personal favourite, Pregnant in Heels, but also to tune into the Asian Food Channel where I’m bombarded with amazing food. An Aussie favourite, My Kitchen Rules is even been screened on a channel called ‘Diva’!

The Asian Food Channel isn’t even limited to Asian food! It screens quite a few Canadian productions, where everything is cooked in maple sauce and/or bacon, it screens Nigella and Heston nightly, and most painful of all, the channel screens those bloody ‘rustic’ English cooking shows where you see a cute pig in a farm, and then it cuts to a butcher, then it cuts to a rustic wooden kitchen where Chef Ade is showing you how to make the perfect roast. ARGH, it’s killing me.

I’m now, like Lionel, permanently hungry. We are hungry for proper pasta, proper casseroles, a proper English breakfast, a proper STEAK!!

Watching cooking shows and salivating is the thing that makes me most homesick. Thanks to Skype, FaceTime, Facebook, the blog etc. we can keep in contact with our family and friends, we can’t however keep in touch with our taste buds!

I miss buying some vegetables from our dodgy soulless corporation of a supermarket. I miss buying a herb plant from a nursery with the intention to grow a self sustaining herb garden and then inadvertently killing said plant by watering it too much or too little. I miss going to the South Melbourne market and buying 12 oysters for a dollar each and eating them by the bin after dousing each one with some lemon and Tabasco sauce (I’ll even forgive them for raising the price by 10 cents just before we left!).

I want to cook. I loved to cook. Lionel and I always cooked together; cracking a beer open and literally stirring the pot as we talked about our work day. We made lasagnas, pizzas from scratch, Sunday roasts, pan fried fish, I even tried a pea soup one time (took hours, we ate at around 11pm!) and we cooked steak and veggies at least three times a week. Occasionally we would cook and then take the still warm dish to my parents’ house, an hour away, to enjoy it with my family.

Is it crazy to miss food and cooking food this much?