FOREWORD

In AFTER TOAST, Kate Gibbs visits the culinary lives of young, aspiring cooks. She relives her own cooking steps at a teenager and young adult, and delves into the lives, interests, language, expressions and fresh ideas of the young for food.

We start with Breakfast, with recipes such as Not-quite huevos rancheros and Frog in the hole–‘round egg, round hole’. It all seems like great fun. What a good idea to have a Great-fast smoothie or a Peaches and cream smoothie, and with Hash browns and Bacon and corn muffins, breakfast presents as a meal you just wouldn’t want to miss.

Kate offers good, sensible advice, too. ‘This book kind of demands a love of food,’ she writes. ‘I just don’t believe you can cook well unless you love to eat.’ There’s no hint of the school marm about this–it’s knowing the realities of bad habits, the mistakes that many of us make in our early years when cooking and eating.

Snacks are given a healthy spin with the likes of Holy moley guacamole. Lunch and Dinner is appropriate with the same enthusiasm. The chapter Parties & Friends is a cheerful way to say ‘what-to-cook through any social spell, while eating well’.

Hints scattered through the book shed light on complicated subjects for the culinary novice. ‘How to host a sophisticated gathering’ tells you: ‘First tidy up, but remember, you’re having friends over, not the Queen. So sure, clean the bathroom. Get a bunch of flowers if you like and pop them in a large glass jar.’ It’s good advice for even the more established host.

With so many mouth-watering photographs and simple-to-follow recipes, it will be easy to spoil family and friends, and yourselves. You will enjoy the many expert tips on cooking, life and the world that are scattered through the book. The design also warrants a mention, it just adds to the excitement.

Rarely have I read a book that invades and expresses an age and era so completely. And not only that–these words and recipes make such good reading. This book has cast a magic spell over me, taking me back in time to my own youth, to a time that wasn’t quite so forward-thinking and exciting as this book offers. May I say, I want to be 20 again!

Congratulations, my granddaughter, Kate.

MARGARET FULTON

… There’s a sound that happens when you run your finger along the spines of books packed into a bookshelf. Tap tap tap tap click click tap tap. The sound changes depending on whether they’re little paperback novels or those hard-cover, thick-bound, seriously big books. Or a long row of cookbooks, say. Don’t let this book become one of those books that just sit there gathering dust. Instead, keep it with you to actually use.

This book is about how to make food. Food to eat. Food you can cook. Food that you’ll want to eat, and that you will like, and that your friends and family will like. Food you’ll be really, really proud to tell your mates you cooked.

I am not entirely sure I buy in to the idea of kids’ or young people’s food, in the sense that the more you restrict the sorts of food you eat, the less adventurous you’ll be with food for the rest of your life.

You can scale a wall. You can tell your little brother what to do. You’ve heard of trigonometry and can spell words like ‘Mississippi’ and ‘hyperbole’. You can do a very cool dance in your room by yourself and you know how to upload videos to YouTube. You can text as fast as you can talk. You can do mini peace talks between friends, you can surf, and you know one to ten in another language. Dude, you can cook pots de creme.

My parents have a whole room in their house full of cookbooks. My mother’s a professional cook, so that makes sense. I grew up surrounded by amazing, healthy and real food–my mum and dad had me stirring pots and chopping herbs and deglazing pans once I was tall enough to see over the kitchen bench. I knew what a roux was and I knew 180° Celsius was a reasonable temperature to bake many things. But it wasn’t until I was much older that I actually cooked an entire meal. By myself.

As a self-declared ‘foodie’ as a teenager, I once told my friends I’d make roast chicken for them while my parents were away. Easy? Um, no, not actually. It’s not at all easy if you’ve never cooked a whole meal by yourself. I mean all the shopping, all the chopping, all the stuffing herby butter under the chicken’s skin, avoiding burns on the oven or the hot roasting tin, timing the vegetables to be cooked and done about the same time as the chicken–in other words, proper cooking.

My advice then, as someone who once only knew how to make toast or the more daring sandwich or salad, but then gradually learned how to cook, is just to start cooking. Make pikelets today. Then, tomorrow, make a grilled quesadilla. In a week, bake a cake. By next month, you can serve a whole meal. True.

And that is what this book is about. It’s about giving you, the discerning young eater, the mini gastronome, well-informed choices about what you eat. But this means you’re doing the cooking. You can have your cake, as they say, but you have to bake it.

What you choose to eat is of course up to you. But please, please, let’s not be dull. Let’s be interesting about it. Let’s be a bit adventurous. Let’s open ourselves to a world of really good food. Here are some things you should know:

#  cooking is something you can do

#  cooking is creative

#  cooking is scientific

#  good food wins you friends

#  healthy food makes you smarter

#  food you make at home is cheaper

#  eat better now, look better your whole life

#  eat more veg–it’s good for you and the planet

I hope you take this cooking-and-eating-really-awesome-food thing seriously, and happily. And I hope you discover the joy of cooking, too.