I NDULGE / HOME COOKING
“I TRULY DO LOVE THE EVERYDAY” MasterChef alum Adam Liaw, champion of home cooking and host of hit SBS series The Cook Up , is thrilled that Australians are thinking about their kitchen skills in a whole new way. Words CAMERON BAYLEY Photography STEVE BROWN
A dam Liaw admits his process of putting together a cookbook is pretty simple. “I come home, cook dinner for my family, and if it works, I write the recipe down and it goes into the book,” he says, laughing, down the phone (while preparing a meal, naturally). It makes sense then that 7 Days of Dinner , his ninth cookbook, is dedicated to his wife Asami and their three young children. “You’re the ones who eat all this food every day,” he writes. Malaysian-born Adam, who moved with his family to Australia at the age of three, first burst onto our screens as the winner of MasterChef Australia in 2010, and then travelled the world for years with his TV show Destination Flavour , cooking exotic foods in exotic places. Today, he says, the food he loves making most is prepared in his own kitchen. Home cooking is at the heart of his new book, which addresses life’s big daily conun- drum: what to have for dinner. “There’s no shortage of recipes in the world,” Adam says. “So I think one of the problems that people have these days is not [around] knowing what to cook, it’s deciding what to cook.” Each chapter is devoted to aligning meals to each day of the week, including Meat-Free Monday, Wok Wednesday and Saturday Stews. Plus he dedicates a chapter to that beloved staple: Sunday Roasts. “Some of the roasts are a lot more affordable, some of them are a lot easier to cook, some of them are just not so big.” His ethos is to give options, streamline processes, introduce new ideas. We may still
cook within our comfort zones, he explains, but these are growing. Case in point is Adam’s approach to frying mushrooms, for which people stop him in the street to thank him. (Put simply, microwave them first, and they’ll fry up “within about 60 seconds” and not soak up all your oil.) It’s also the raison d’être of his hit SBS series The Cook Up With Adam Liaw , which hit a land- mark 500th episode in its fifth season this year. In each episode, he’s joined by two guests who whip up a favourite dish, and he’ll throw one in too (the recipes in 7 Days of Dinner are drawn from his creations on the show). “One of the strengths of the show is that we don’t do it artificially. If something goes wrong, I’m up-front with the audience going, ‘well that didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to’,” he says. “It really is supposed to be taking cooking back to the home cooks.” Adam feels there’s been a revolution in how Australians regard our kitchen endeavours, and he couldn’t be happier about it. “The great thing about home cooking now in Australia is that we have realised that it is not the same as restaurant cooking,” he says. “I think this is a disservice that a lot of cooking shows have done to us. They were, like, ‘If you want to cook well, you’ve got to cook like all these fancy chefs’, and that’s absolutely not the case. They’re two completely different styles of cooking that aren’t comparable. “I truly do love the everyday,” he says. “There are a lot of wonderful moments you can have just doing what you do.”
7 Days of Dinner by Adam Liaw (Hardie Grant Books, $49.99), is out on 4 October.
Turn the page for three recipes from the cookbook.
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DARE SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2023
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