If we were to visit a camp of our simian forebears, around 400,000 years ago, they would not be huddled around a fire because they had not discovered it yet. Our friends Og the Hunter and Phil the Procreator lived only 10,000 years ago, but they lived in comparative luxury, being able to burn things before they ate them.
The scientists are still proving and disproving each other’s theories (i.e. arguing) about when humankind mastered fire, but between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago seems a decent stab. It probably went something like this …
Our ancestors were friendly folk and let their pigs wander through the basic structures they used to shelter from the rain, as well as from enraged woolly mammoths and starving sabre-toothed tigers. (Even woolly mammoths weren’t immune to the influence of proving they were tough men, by the way. A great majority of fossils are young males, which means they were the idiots showing off and doing stupid stuff like jumping in tarpits.)
One day there was a thunderstorm and a prehistoric shack got hit by lightning and burnt down. The unfortunate family pig was trapped inside and ended up baking in the embers for some hours.
Taking our ancestors’ tiny frontal lobe, oversized jaw and total lack of language skills into account, the spirit of their conversation was probably something like this:
‘Good grief, Barry. I think Harold the pig got caught in the fire. I can’t believe he’s gone.’
‘I loved him too. Um … Simon, what’s that unbelievably delicious aroma?’
‘I don’t know … but it’s like nothing I’ve ever smelled before!’
Some hours later …
‘Burp! That was incredible! Who knew if you burnt things they tasted better! Let’s do it again! From now on this delicious stuff shall be known as Harold!’
‘Hmm … not sure about that. What about bacon?’
‘Brilliant! We invented bacon!’
Together: ‘Yay, bacon! Let’s use that fire stuff to make some more!’
This moment changed the path of human history, and turned us from plant-eating apes into omnivorous Homo sapiens, proudly taking our place at the top of the planet’s food chain.
Before the advent of fire, cooking and bacon, we simply ate raw vegetable matter, like the great apes still do. Because there weren’t many kilojoules in the nuts, berries and leaves, we had to eat a lot of them to stay alive. We were eating all day, putting away as much as possible, and very probably had a large, hard distended gut, like a cow’s.
All the foraging, chewing and wandering around with a huge belly took a lot of energy, as did digesting roots and leaves. We were about as neurologically developed as our diets would allow us to be. But when everyone started burning their dead cows and making burgers, something incredible happened.
Cooking food, especially meat, makes it much easier to chew and digest. It releases more kilojoules than raw food. Tasty energy bombs of meat supercharged our brains. And the brain is a total energy hog, using 20 per cent of the energy we consume, despite being only 2 per cent of our body mass. If a gorilla were to grow a brain as big as ours he would have a really huge head, and would have to eat for another two hours a day—on top of the nine he already spends eating.
And because we didn’t have to spend all day foraging, we spent more time socialising around the newfangled campfire. We lived longer, and more of us lived. And instead of chewing our food with our huge jaws, we used our bigger brains to make tools to cut our food. We came down from the branches, abandoned the morphology that allows apes to swing through the trees, and started sleeping on the ground, our beloved fires keeping the things that might snack on us away.
Our faces changed shape, and speech and language developed. It is safe to say that cooking literally made us human.
If our ancestors had remained vegans, we’d all be gym-lean but, ironically, way too stupid to work out how to make tofu.
A leading proponent of the theory is the Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University, Richard Wrangham. ‘When our ancestors first learned to cook, the initial impact of the extra energy would have been they would have had more babies than they did before,’ he says. ‘The babies were able to survive better, and the adults had more regular menstrual cycles and put more energy into their immune systems.’
Food is still the foundation of our families, communities and cultures. Food creates warmth, nourishment and conversation. Food, love and sex are all wrapped around each other, in both our prehistoric brains and in every element of our popular culture.
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Being able to cook is an essential skill for men. Not only do you lose weight, save money and eat much better food than UberEats delivers, you’re using your creativity, empathy and communication skills, you’re being nurturing and unselfish, you’re being vulnerable, and you’re showing love—all the opposite of what’s in the Man Box.
There’s no doubt an angry incel would be much more successful with the opposite sex if he turned off the computer and started chopping an onion.
Women love a man who can cook. They love watching a man cook. They find it sexy. There’s no doubt it’s hot in the kitchen. ‘Men look sexy when they cook, regardless of what they’re making,’ says Dr Maryanne Fisher in Psychology Today.
There is a very close relationship between love, sex, and food. It’s hard to feel romantic if you’re starving, On the other hand, when you first meet someone and are completely infatuated, often you lose your sense of hunger, our bodies produce a chemical stimulant, phenylethylamine (PEA) and norepinephrine. They make our bodies feel alert, alive, giddy, excited and many of us lose our appetite. The human need for food and sex are basic, part of the foundation of our nature.
I’m going to focus on cooking now because it’s the domestic task I find most pleasurable. Apart from that, it’s a wonderful skill that makes all men better men. I don’t know one man who has learned to cook who doesn’t adore the process and the joy it brings, to him and to others. All human beings love praise, and most men are suckers for it. We are easily delighted when women tell us we’ve done a good job.
There may well be an element of ‘look at me’ about men stirring a risotto with determined concentration. It’s in our genes. When our primate relatives, chimpanzees, are campaigning for the coveted position of alpha male in the family group (I believe the collective noun for chimps is a ‘whoop’, but I can’t bring myself to use it seriously), they play with babies and hold them aloft, like human politicians. They’re sending a signal to the females: ‘Look, I didn’t kill the baby!’
They’re also very attentive and domestic, making sure the females know what nice guys they are. Because the alpha male gets the pick of the females and all the sex he wants. That’s a big reward for being the alpha. He gets all the girls and his strong genetic material is passed on to the next generation. There’s a link not only between sex and food, but between sex and other domestic work as well.
We may be well into the 21st century already, but men are just not pulling their weight at home. We’re not doing it because we don’t have to. We get away with it when we can. The reason men talk of ‘babysitting’ our own children is simply because we do it so rarely. We ignore washing and cleaning until someone else does it—a woman. Somehow, work around the house—doing what is necessary to keep us comfortable, fed, clean and clothed—is still seen as women’s work.
Data from the 2016 Census shows that the typical Australian woman spends between five and fourteen hours a week doing unpaid housework. Men are doing less than five. The time and mental stresses of housework have real-world and long-term economic consequences for women’s employment. Two children can knock a woman out of the workforce for a decade, reducing the total of her lifetime earnings. One in three Australian women retires without any superannuation at all.
When we are single, housework is divided most equally by gender. But when a woman starts living with a man, her housework time goes up, and his … well, we’re busy on the couch.
The issue is just not the unequal division of labour but also the way caring for children means women somehow have to do almost everything else as well. Even women who work full-time remain responsible for arranging child care, checking homework and lunches, wiping vomit, feeding puppies and listening to emotional anecdotes about a mean girl at ballet practice.
The key to the shackles that tie women to the washing machine is in the hands of men. We must simply do our share. Then our partners might be less stressed. They might be able to earn more. Even more importantly, they might realise their potential, which can only make them happier people.
This is why women think that a man who can cook, and who pulls his weight around the house and with the kids, makes an attractive partner. It speaks to his values as a human being. The level of a man’s domesticity can be seen by women as a demonstration of his ‘goodness’.
There’s no doubt that a man who’s great around the house is also going to have a great time in bed. She’s less tired, for a start. But, at its extreme, the idea of rewarding men with sex for work around the house is more than a little icky.
Feel relieved if you’ve been fortunate enough to avoid the idea of ‘choreplay’ so far in your life. The idea took root after an opinion piece in the New York Times, in 2015, by Facebook COO and founder of leanin.org, Sheryl Sandberg, encouragingly entitled ‘How Men Can Succeed in the Boardroom and the Bedroom’:
Research shows that when men do their share of chores, their partners are happier and less depressed, conflicts are fewer and divorce rates are lower. They live longer, too; studies demonstrate there’s a longevity boost for men and women who provide care and emotional support to their partners in later life.
Then came the zinger: ‘Couples who share chores equally have more sex.’ Sandberg cited a study by researchers Constance T. Gager and Scott T. Yabiku, called ‘Who Has the Time? The Relationship Between Household Labor Time and Sexual Frequency’. Sandberg suggested that instead of buying flowers, a man pick up a load of laundry. ‘Choreplay,’ she said, ‘is real.’
This idea flew around the internet and somehow became flipped on its head. It was suddenly about making the man do more housework by rewarding him with treats—sex—instead of the idea that sharing the load could be the catalyst for a better relationship.
I abhor the idea of choreplay. I want to be wanted for me, like every sane person on the planet, not because I took the bins out. Also, the idea that women are more interested in a clean house than in hot sex is clearly utter rubbish. But only a slight step back from that is the truth that balanced relationships, where both work and play are shared, are more rewarding, great for our mental health and memories, great for kids and … more sexy.
There is no doubt food is where the love is. (But not ‘made with love’. I prefer my food cooked with good produce as well as a loving attitude, sure, but nowhere have I read a recipe where love is an actual ingredient.) Our brains give us pleasure rewards for doing things which keep the species alive and, wonderfully, eating is one of them. Life and pleasure come from sex, and life and pleasure come from food. When you cook for someone, you’re offering the gift of another day of life, through sustenance. And by making that food as delicious as possible, you’re giving another human a gift of the pleasure of eating.
(To be clear, before you hit the kitchen, make sure you’re pulling your weight with child care, laundry, cleaning, bed making and shopping. Only then can you put on your private cooking show.)
The very act of cooking, thinking in advance about what you’re going to make, being sure the people you’re cooking for will like it, the purchasing, the prep, the execution and the eating—they’re all profound acts of love.
The kitchen is the heart of every home. There’s simply nothing more convivial than sharing a glass of wine (come to think of it, we can have one each) with someone you truly love, as things simmer on the stove and roast in the oven. Smells fill the warm air and you know the next few hours are going to be devoted to the deep and simple pleasures of eating and talking.
The act of cooking makes time for conversation. And conversation is a key ingredient in your family’s successful relationships which is a key to mental health and happiness.
The number of words that fill a house can make the difference between a child’s success and failure in life. Two intrepid education researchers, Dr Betty Hart and Todd Risley, conceived an amazing study. They recorded every word spoken in the homes of 42 families, professional, working-class or welfare-dependent, for an hour a month, for three and a half years following babies from before they could talk.
As the researchers painstakingly transcribed and tallied every word, they came to an extraordinary realisation. By the age of three, the ‘professional’ children had heard 45 million words. The ‘working-class’ kiddies had heard 26 million words, and the poor welfare kids just 13 million.
The 30-million-word advantage the richest children had over the poorest meant they were able to learn more, increase their language skills and build neural pathways on their own. The more words a child hears, the more their brains grow.
And the words the professional children heard were a lot nicer, too. They got six positive ‘affirmations’ an hour, and one negative ‘prohibition’. Working-class children got two positives to one negative, while the welfare children were slammed, hearing two negative comments for every one positive.
Children mimic their parents’ language, so by the time they started school, the affluent children, with their big, shiny vocabularies, had learned all the language skills and traits that made their parents rich. And the poor kids, short on verbal ability and encouragement, were doomed to repeat their mums’ and dads’ failure.
So talking in the kitchen, and everywhere else, is critical. If, like me, you’re not in the ‘rich’ category, you can still give your kids a rich-kid advantage simply by talking to them.
But there’s no point in learning to cook just to attract women, like some pick-up artist. You can’t fake the love, care, thought, practice and effort involved. That’s why it’s attractive to women. It’s the authentic you at work.
Here’s what being a man who cooks says about you:
1. You’re sensitive. You are showing you care with your work, time and thought. You want to make your partner happy and spend time with her.
2. You’re creative. Artistic people are great at expressing themselves, and you can show you’re an exceptional human being with a creative soul through your food.
3. You understand success. Cooking is about completing a project successfully, planning, coordinating, using multiple skills and bringing an attractive dish together on time.
4. You’re a grown-up. If you exist on chocolate milk and cheeseburgers, she’s going to work out you’re not a sophisticated, worldly person, open to other ideas, cultures and experiences.
5. You’re interesting. Being able to cook makes her wonder how you learned to make such wonderful food, when and who for. She’ll want to get to know you better and become part of your food life story.
6. You’re skilled. Great chef skills are amazing to watch. She’ll love seeing you reduce an onion to dice with a flash of steel, or deglaze a pan in a drama of hiss and flame.
7. You’re sensual. As you touch and taste with fingers and mouth, she’s going to innately understand you’re good with your hands and comfortably connected to your sensual self.
Our guitar face may be the same as our sex face, but you could argue that the grimaces and moans of pleasure that come from eating are also very close.
Lipstick shouts attraction simply because the flash of red is supposed to mimic the flush of female sexual arousal in our male brains. Both eating and sex involve all our senses. They both involve taking things into spaces in our wet, warm bodies. They both involve hunger, savouring, joy and, ultimately, satisfaction.
So if cooking is so wonderful, why aren’t more men popping on an apron and whipping up a pineapple upside-down cake?
There are lots of things barring us from the joys of the kitchen, just because we’re men.
We don’t like taking direction. Men like to pretend we know how to do things, because not knowing is a sign of weakness. That’s why we don’t like asking for directions. Recipes are directions.
We also don’t like the unfamiliar. If we’re not good at something, men don’t like to do it. And we’re terrified of being judged incompetent if we do have a go. Closely related is a fear of failure. This is why I never play golf.
We’re often reluctant to commit the time. Or the effort.
And even though, at the top of the rock ’n’ roll world of celebrity chefs, it’s a sausage party, with Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal and Jamie Oliver and Rick Stein and a thousand other men running the world’s leading commercial kitchens, somehow cooking is still seen by some men as a little too … feminine.
In fact, the world of professional food is a pretty standard man’s world. Many chefs are ravaged by drug and alcohol abuse. Commercial kitchens are bubbling with anger, aggression, violence and sexual assault. The brutal hours and stress routinely ruin minds and lives. But it doesn’t have to be like that at home.
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Cooking is basically an exercise in good project management. It involves procuring the best tools and produce, utilising the best techniques and consulting experts, and the aim is delivering a quality product, on budget and on deadline. These are things in which even the most ‘manly’ of men consider themselves expert.
There are basically two phases in learning to cook. Like learning a martial art or high-performance driving, there’s a boring bit at the start where you have to hit the heavy bag for ages, or walk the track putting out cones. There’s no avoiding that learning to cook requires a bit of time and effort. But you can make it rewarding and fun, and you’re upskilling yourself for life.
Try books like How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, or I’m Just Here for the Food by Alton Brown, for basic recipes and pointers.
First, you need to get your equipment sorted. This is a fun part.
Great cooking equipment is wonderful precision technology, just like the best in watches, racing bikes, cars, audio and computer tech. It’s a specialist field, but once you’re into it, the equipment is as sexy and drool-worthy as what you’d see through the window of a Porsche dealership.
Like everything in life, get the best quality you can afford, and you’ll be rewarded for years after you’ve forgotten the price.
Get a big, heavy, double-sided wooden chopping board, the bigger the better. Google how to look after it. Look after it. Don’t ever put a wooden chopping board in the dishwasher. Only use one side for garlic and onions.
Cooking is one of the only areas in life where you’re actively encouraged to play with knives. Get a knife made for chopping, so you can learn good knife technique. Knife skills are critical because speed and precision are critical to a successful, scrumptious spread. To do that super-fast chopping thing chefs do, flashing the blade along the back of their fingers as a bunch of parsley becomes … chopped parsley, the knife needs to be curved to rock on the board. Get a slicing knife, for carving and frenching cutlets, and slicing chicken. Maybe you’ll need a fruit knife and a paring blade. And anything else you like the look of. Most good knives come in a block with everything you need, or with a magnetic strip that attaches to your kitchen wall and looks cheffy cool.
When I started cooking, some twenty years ago, I got a set of Global knives, which look brilliant. They’re crafted in one piece and have steel handles. The brand’s website says encouraging things about samurai swords; a thousand years of Japanese sword-making history are going into a weapon for you to chop spuds.
Pots and pans are the same. The heavier the better. Weight means there’s a big chunk of metal on the bottom, which will distribute heat more evenly. Understanding the dynamics and properties of heat is also critical to cooking. It’s also better to cook with gas because you can change the heat more quickly. It’s a saying for a reason.
My personal choice was the French brand Le Creuset (for which you are fully excused in muttering ‘Wanker’). They’re a bit rough on the wallet, no doubt, but chunky enough to be a decent weapon in the event of a home invasion. They’re also forged in one piece and come in an array of funky colours—blue, pink, green, yellow, red, cream: an ice-cream parlour of culinary chic.
I am thoroughly ashamed to say that, at a time in my life when I earned more than a struggling writer, I had a full set of cream Le Creuset and—in matching cream, darling—a toaster, jug, espresso machine and cake mixer by the old-school American brand KitchenAid.
‘There is no object you own that is anything like your kitchen knife,’ says British food writer Tim Haywood. ‘Think about it—eight inches of lethally sharp, weapons grade metal lying on your kitchen table, possessing the same potential for mayhem as a loaded handgun—yet it is predominantly used to express your love for your family by making their tea.’
The winner of MasterChef Australia in 2010, Adam Liaw, owns a $1500 Japanese yanagiba, but his favourite knife, for its balance and fit, cost only $400.
Former Sydney Morning Herald food critic, former host of the Gourmet Farmer TV show and now the owner of the Fat Pig Farm in Tasmania, Matthew Evans, loves a knife made from an old saw blade with a handle from a deer antler. ‘The maker decides on who the knife suits only after it’s forged,’ he says. ‘The whole thing is a work of art,’ he told the ABC. ‘Holding it, you can feel the energy of the blacksmith pounding on the steel.’
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Find a few recipes you like and learn them. Try Jamie Oliver or Curtis Stone. I had the pleasure of working professionally with food publisher Donna Hay, a very smart, dynamic, canny and driven business woman, She is also a brilliant marketer and peerless food stylist and cook. Her recipes offer a lot of bang for your time and buck. We used to talk about ‘special made simple’ as a core element of the brand.
As you practise, you’ll learn how much oil to glug into a pan, how hot that pan should be, how you like your onions chopped, how lots of tasty things start with a base of onion, garlic, vegetables and herbs sautéed in a pan, how to tell when a steak is cooked by feel, when the pasta is ready, how to steam rice. All the basic stuff.
You reach the second level when you’ve spent enough time in the kitchen to know how much a tablespoon of something is by looking, how much of any given seasoning you like, what goes with what. You taste constantly, adjusting as you go, your palate telling you what to adjust for perfect balance. You can upgrade or dumb down recipes to your personal taste. It’s kind of a magical moment, like when you realise you can ski properly, or have mastered barre chords on the guitar.
Great cooking isn’t about complicated technique, it’s about letting wonderful produce be its best on the plate, and treating it with respect and simplicity. Fresh-caught fish needs only oil, lemon juice and salt. Lamb loves rosemary. Chocolate loves chilli. Duck loves orange.
There are few things more satisfying—and, I would suggest, more attractive—for a woman than telling her, on a weekend morning, what you’re cooking her for dinner. Take her on a leisurely walk or drive to a local market and buy the freshest produce you can, stuff with dirt on it that’s straight from the farm. Try to buy things that have had a happy life. Have lunch. Pick up dessert and wine. Meet in the kitchen, freshly showered, and talk as you cook. Guaranteed best date ever.
Like most men, I have a childlike fascination with fire. I once shoved aside a maître d’ at a restaurant who was fiddling ineffectually with a huge blazing fire. I just had to stoke it and lay the wood in the correct manner.
A kettle barbecue can be a wonderful addition to a man’s quiver of food tricks. My partner bought me my second kettle barbecue for Christmas a few years ago, and jokes that it’s ‘the gift that keeps on giving’. And they work by fire.
A kettle barbecue uses indirect heat, meaning the coals are in piles at each side, not directly under the food. With the lid on, they heat the air as hot as a kitchen oven. The unique and delicious barbecue flavour comes from the meat juices squirting on the coals as it cooks, making smoke and steam that flavours the food and keeps it moist.
The other great thing about the kettle is that, as you cook, the aromas blast out the top of the barbecue; by the time you’re ready to serve, your rosemary lamb or lemon garlic chicken is pretty much all your guests can think about.
If you really want to push the boundaries when you get expert, consider a slow-cooking smoker. These require what can be days of planning—and you have to wake at 3 am to light the fire on game day—but the effort is well worth the praise you’ll get for your twelve-hour pork belly.
Australia boasts a food culture influenced by the cuisines of migrants from all over the world, and a cornucopia of fresh produce from the sea and land, which is the envy of the world.
It wasn’t always so. ‘No other country on earth offers more of everything needed to make a good meal, or offers it more cheaply than Australia; but there is no other country either where the cuisine is more elementary, not to say abominable,’ said the clearly judgy Edmond Marin la Meslée, founder of the Geographical Society of Australasia, in 1883.
Mind you, the early explorers weren’t the sharpest of chaps. On arriving in Australia and meeting Aborigines, English seafarer William Dampier observed, massively incorrectly, that ‘the Earth affords them no food at all. There is neither herb, root, pulse nor any sort of grain for them to eat that we saw.’
After World War II, factories started making refrigerators, not bombs. By 1955, around 73 per cent of metropolitan homes had a fridge. In the 1950s and ’60s, Australians were travelling to Europe by boat and tasting contemporary, sophisticated cooking for the first time.
TV delivered ads for processed food brands, snack and fast foods. And the Greeks and Italians arrived with their zucchinis, capsicums, eggplants, olives, anchovies, artichokes, garlic and chilli. They could only find olive oil on the chemist’s shelves. They began the slow and painful process of convincing white-bread Australia that there was a better way to eat than meat and three boiled veg. No wonder generations of kids hated vegetables.
McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken arrived in the 1960s and ’70s.
Slowly, after a generation, ‘contemporary Australian’ cooking emerged, a joyous fresh fusion of Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Indian, French, Greek, Italian, African, Lebanese, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Portuguese food, to name but a few. Our young, smart, colourful, multicultural food perfectly matches our brilliant, diverse, unique society.
Today, thankfully, people are understanding the value of sustainable, organic artisanal produce, for better health, taste and environmental impact. The suburbs are bristling with bearded bros who make beer, cider and whisky. You can find handmade cheeses and breads, cured meats and organic vegetables in farmers’ markets and community gardens everywhere. The reaction against processed food and factory farming has seen us growing our own food on balconies and backyards once again. We’re understanding the pleasures of picking our own herbs and fresh tomatoes. Bees buzz in our hives and chickens croon in backyard coops.
Those of us still eating meat want the animals that lay down their lives to become our dinner to have lived the best lives possible, in sunshine and fresh air, gambolling in wide open spaces, before the inevitable unfortunate moment.
It’s a great time to start cooking.
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It makes sense to work smarter, not harder, so great cooks make the best use of their time and effort.
Here’s a favourite recipe of mine that originally came from Jamie Oliver, but this is my interpretation. It delivers amazing flavour bang, it looks incredible and you only need basic kitchen skills to pull it off. The sauce is the hero—sweet, zingy, sour, caramel, fishy, aromatic, thick and sticky.
It’s so good I’ve had people refuse to believe I cooked it.
Crispy-skin Salmon with Caramel Tamarind Sauce
Ingredients
vegetable oil
1 knob fresh ginger
soy or tamari (in the Asian section at your supermarket)
tamarind paste (in the Asian section at your supermarket)
fish sauce (in the Asian section at your supermarket)
brown sugar
cucumber
baby salad greens
vietnamese mint
olive oil
one salmon fillet per person, skin on
lime
Method
The Sauce
Make the sauce first. Heat a blob of oil in a pan—it’s hot when it looks like it’s rippling. Skin and grate a knob of ginger the size of your thumb, and cook it off in the hot oil.
When the ginger is just turning golden and you can smell it in the air, add half a cup or so of soy, which will sizzle and deglaze the pan (get all the good sticky bits off the bottom). Then add a tablespoon of tamarind paste, and a tablespoon of fish sauce. Dissolve half a cup of brown sugar in the hot liquid and let it simmer. Now taste it. Is it too sweet? Salty? Sour? Balance it by adding more sugar or tamarind or soy until it tastes just how you want it. You won’t believe the complexity of flavour just five ingredients can generate.
As the sauce simmers down, it will become thicker and stickier. Turn it off when it’s the consistency of bottled barbecue sauce.
The Salad
Pre-prepare your salad once you’ve done your sauce. Simply slice the cucumber thinly on the bias to make some elegant strips. Who needs their good knife and some skills now? Tear up the greens and mint leaves and have everything ready to hit the plate.
The Salmon
Rub your salmon with olive oil, salt and pepper. Do it with your hands. Heat a non-stick pan until it’s scarily hot. Put the fish in with the skin side down, and keep it moving with some tongs. After just a couple of minutes you’ll notice a line of pink-white cooked flesh creeping up into the fillet. When it’s a third of the way up, flip the fish and sear the top for a minute. Let it sit for five minutes out of the pan. It’ll keep cooking, and when you fork it you should be able to flake off delicate petals of pink flesh that melt in your mouth.
The Plating
Arrange the salad: cucumber strips at the bottom, greens on top. Be careful and delicate. Put the fish on the side and, with a teaspoon, drizzle the dark, pungent sauce over it. Squirt with lime juice to cut the sauce.
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This is how food should be—simple, healthy, delicious, fresh, easy. It is guaranteed to blow your friends and family away. (If it doesn’t, tweet me.)
To be able to cook connects you directly with the human joys of nurturing, caring for and loving other people. It requires empathy and creativity. If you’re having fun in the kitchen with the people you love, domestic violence is probably a long way away. Cooking is an antidote to what’s in the Man Box, banishing toughness, stoicism, control and aggression. It’s difficult to sexually objectify a woman you’re making a risotto for. This is completely different from thinking your partner is hot, and wanting to be romantic and sexy with her. That’s actively encouraged. Food will always play a central role in our sex lives.
You’ll be healthier when you’re eating less processed food. And you cook to your own taste point, so your food is always the best. You save money on home delivery and restaurants. You give your friends and lovers the gifts of pleasure and nourishment. What’s not to love?
Gentlemen, you’re a better man with a better life if you can cook.
Your time starts … now!