Week 5: Favorite Food. What was your favorite food from childhood? If it was homemade, who made it? What was in this dish, and why was it your favorite? What is your favorite dish now?Food was largely plain when I was growing up. New Zealand in the 1970s didn't have lot of choices in the shops. Cooking was largely bland, with few people experimenting. Our home wasn't that different, I expect.
However, one thing my mum cooked that I loved, was a sweet curry. True, it was a tamed down version of curry, but curry it was nonetheless.
She used to make it with chicken, and put sultanas, apples, pears, bananas - oh whatever she got her hands on, in it. I loved it. Mum had learned to cook it when Dad was stationed in Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf (when he was still in the Royal Navy). We lived there for a couple of years from when I was about two.
The weather was very hot there of course, and the idea was to eat hot spicy food to bring your internal body temperature up to your external body temperature.
I still love sweet currys (although spicier than when I was a child). I love the fact that you can get so many different ingredients, and eat food from so many different ethnicities.
My favourite food of choice though, is Italian food. Not so much the pastas and pizzas, but the other Italian dishes. I just love the mix of herbs, spices - the sauces etc.
I do cook a mean lasagne actually, so I am told by anyone who has it. I usually cook a beef lasagne, although I have been known to whip up a vegetable lasagne when we have a vegetarian come over for dinner.
I love the Kiwi barbecue. My husband, who is English, has a Kiwi soul. And even before I'd brought him back to NZ for a visit, he could cook a barbecue better than most people I know. We like meats with marinades, yummy potato salads, and I do a green salad that has so many different ingredients in it: sweetcorn kernels, egg, cheese, tomatoes, beetroot, cucumber, peppers, grated carrot - and lettuce (mesculin preferably).
Now its 11.30pm and all this talk of food has made my tummy rumble . . . I'm hungry!
