From farmeress to fryer

For about four months, including the Christmas season, Mary and I (committee members) cooked three nights a week and catered for events at the Maungaturoto Country Club.

Within an hour or so of my first session as a volunteer cook I’d started two fat fires and cut my thumb. The fires (small) happened when I was filling the fryers with new fat. Tip: melt some in a saucepan first and pour it into the fryers before you turn them on, hence fat won’t drip onto hot elements and ignite. (I know you’ve always wanted to learn this.)

As the first cooking day loomed I mentioned to Rex that I should get new trou so I didn’t wreck my good ones and he suggested chef’s pants. I ordered black and white checked jobs from aptly-named Black & White Trading and when they arrived learned Rex had said ‘cheap pants’. Me and my dodgy hearing! But never mind, our baggy (and daggy) creations are cool and comfy.

As I write this we’ve had no disasters. Came close when we ran out of chips, but as my catering partner Mary said, it would only have been a disaster if we’d had no spuds to make more chips with.

This reminded me of my stint as a chalet girl at Madonna di Campiglio, a ski resort in Italy, and my most embarrassing cooking experience (and it wasn’t even my fault) which surely could never be surpassed.

Three of us and an Italian-speaking liaison person ran a chalet for 30 guests. Each day we’d each make starter, main or dessert, divide it in thirds and have a ‘dinner party’ for 10 on each of the three floors.

Guests stayed a week or two then left en masse. When each busload rolled up we’d serve LO Soup made of whizzed up, jazzed up leftovers. If it came out a dark colour, we’d slosh in red wine. Pale soup got white wine. LO Soup was best eaten at 1am after you’d endured a flight from London and a gruelling seven-hour bus trip into the mountains.

Actually, it was tasty and we never had a complaint - until Julia arrived. Even though the ‘can you cook’ test wasn’t rigorous, Julia appeared to have used other talents to get the job. In fact, we had bets about who she’d ‘hit it off with’ each week. Sometimes we all won. No . . . just kidding. Anyway, Julia whizzed up chicken without removing the bones (amazing but true!). We discovered this when guests started picking bits of chicken bone out of their teeth. We didn’t let Julia near LO Soup again and put her under strict surveillance.

As I’m not thinking much about farming at the mo, my dog Floss is confused. Three nights a week I leave home as a human and, her top-to-toe sniff confirms, return as a massive French fry.

It’s such a busy time that one morning we couldn’t find some cattle that had should have been moved to a new paddock the evening before . . . until we noticed half a dozen heads peeking round a bluff. They’d got fed up waiting and had taken off in an unexpected direction.

Not unlike me and the deep fryer – it’s a really unexpected direction.