Whether or not you foster a deep love of cooking, it’s a daily task you’ll undertake almost every day of your life. And when your family goes from just one or two, to three, four or more…panic surrounding what to make everyone for dinner can set in.
WATCH: Tommy Pham’s pork rib soup
Two-time audience fave MasterChef Australia contestant Tommy Pham knows this, and is a driving force behind his debut cookbook My Family Kitchen that releases today July 4.
“One of the most stressful times for parents is feeding a family…It’s already hard with just two people, then all of a sudden now you’ve got a whole family…and the third or fourth person is a little person that doesn’t really know what they want,” Tommy tells Better Homes and Gardens Australia.
Instead of cooking two separate meals, Tommy’s recipes are about saving time by raising your kids on the food that you like and tweaking the flavours in their servings slightly.
“If they enjoy what you eat most of the time, that removes that kind of stress [from the mental load of cooking].”
You can pick up a copy of Tommy Pham’s My Family Kitchen published by Penguin Random House Australia from July 4, here.
The importance of learning to cook
Inspired by Tommy’s heritage and memories of learning to cook with his mum growing up in the south western Sydney suburb Cabramatta, My Family Kitchen highlights the “fresh and fragrant” flavours of Vietnamese food.
From canh chua (sweet-and-sour tamarind fish soup) to chè trôi nước (sweet rice dumplings), the kid-friendly cookbook features 60 Vietnamese and other Asian cuisine-inspired recipes and activities that aim to encourage a love of food in kids through cooking and play.
Speaking to the importance of feeling comfortable in the kitchen as a kid, the former desktop engineer and school teacher says, “I think the biggest shock for most young adults leaving home is like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to cook every single night’, right?… If you come out of your parents home, kind of enjoying the process already, then it’s a little bit less painful”.
And as a culinary master as well as dad to two young boys Miles and Hugo, Tommy has some pretty handy tips for getting the kids involved with cooking.
Tips for introducing kids to the kitchen
“I think always start with something they already love to eat. Maybe it’s that mango ice cream we eat all the time,” Tommy says, “because they’re already excited about the mango ice cream aspect…they’re more inclined to stay along during the process”.
“But if it’s not something that they totally love, they can kind of stray away from the whole process like ‘oh, this is boring’.”
The Masterchef Australia alum suggests asking something like “we’re making the pork stew you love to eat, do you want to come help me?” as a gateway to getting them into the kitchen.
More cooking tips from a two-time Masterchef contestant
Reflecting on his time in the Masterchef kitchen and “cooking from his heritage”, Tommy shares how learning to balance flavours from his mum set a strong foundation for his practice and experimentations.
“One of the hardest things about cooking is that when you make a recipe that you’re not too familiar with, by the end, it tastes a little bit off; I think this is where most good cooks shine. Everybody can follow a recipe…but it’s what you do with that product that makes it taste good.
“And if you understand that salt, fish sauce, sugar, vinegar does this, you can turn an average meal into a restaurant quality meal… The more often you cook something, the better you get at it. Full stop.”
And when it comes to time-hacking tools in the kitchen, Tommy sings his praises for rice cookers, and in particular air fryers (he’s a big fan of the pressure cook setting on the Ninja model).
“They save so much time in the kitchen…it does the same thing as an oven but faster and I think everybody needs more time in their life.”
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