Just Add Meatwater

The table sat in a kind of lobby between the kitchen and lounge. A place to check in , get your mail, read the paper. It was always liberally covered in stuff, and the veneered and phoney wood-grain of the surface (1972-1975) would sink, unseen under the detritus, the stuff of everyone’s day. And other stuff, stuff which no-one owned. Little bark and Styrofoam owls, plastic cups, satee skewers, junk mail.

‘Are these yours?’ ‘What are they?’ ‘Bark owls with styrofoam under them … I’ll throw them out I guess.’

‘Who does this notepad belong to? It’s little, with a few groceries written on it.’ A pause as we all stared for a few seconds without recognition and then binned the item.


Unattended, the desk rubbish would begin to rise like a papier mache representation of Mt Fuji, or the mountain which drives Richard dreyfuss nuts in Close Encounters. We were messy, but it was when the table was cleared that the fear would kick in. The torn envelopes and filthy tea-towels and mugs would vanish, which meant only one thing. Anthea was cooking. An extra chair brought in as customary, and then the arrival of placemats … oh god, here we go again.

I thought I was a bad cook … well I am a bad cook, no doubt about it, but back in the nineties in this share house in Elwood I happened upon someone who was even less talented than me, and this discovery, sad to say, came from first hand experience.

She was a housemate , a well-meaning cheerful person always keen to have a crack with meal ideas, but a girl of little expertise in the kitchen. In fact she was possessed of an outrageous anti-talent with food, somehow enabling staples such as potatoes, pork chops, and lamb mince to taste so deplorable you couldn’t imagine that eating the stuff raw, or even frozen and raw, would be any worse.

One of her glittering triumphs was a dish I christened meatwater. It consisted of some sort of dead animal (I think she rotated between chicken, pork and beef to display her variety of skills. It was all a cadaverous grey anyway) boiled and soaked in its own stock, a foodstuff I’m a bit suspicious of at the best of times, because it looks like a kind of fatty detritus marinated in the sweat of a slaughtered farm animal.

With these sort of concoctions on the cards, I would excuse myself from dinner at home as often as possible, having eaten earlier or about to go out with friends (mostly fibs).

I’m not that interested in food. I just grab stuff; tins of soup or beans, packet pasta, Birds-Eye fish, raw mushrooms and carrot. I love bacon and eggs but I’m too lazy to bother with that even. In light of this philosophy it might surprise you, but when I finally get off my arse and put some effort in, my spag bol is the best in the world. So I do know that preparing food is nowhere near as difficult as I pretend it to be.

And oh how pleased I was of myself as I presented my bellisomo Italiano food. The housemates seated, the plates arriving over their shoulders, and then the bowls with several choices of cheese, the garlic bread from Pizza Hut. That would be me done for a few months.

But back to the food on offer. As well as meatwater there were pasta dishes, the various dry packet spaghettis and fetuccinis cooked by her not so much al dente as al dentist. I have eaten from gluepots of indistinct vegetables collected together in something not quite leaky enough to be soup, but far too soft to be recognizable by names – Potato? Pumpkin? Some other manner of recipe from the gulags of Stalinist Russia? Another presentation was Slopkettle, and you really don’t want to know about that.

And in close quarters, our mouths only a few feet apart, the onus was on me to make ‘ooh delicious!’ noises. The other member of the household, Dan was such a wonderful person, he would eat without complaint, and would genuinely accept Anthea’s dishes as food, and not consider the vast demerit points I always tallied.

And every so often of course, there would be afters. The blurring of ingredients was even worse here. Apple crumble was the recurring dessert. The gritty crumble at the top appeared to have been flame-grilled, while the apple at the bottom was a kind of sauce. In between was a two centimetre layer of spakfilla stodge. Coming out of the oven, the prepared dish would have shrivelled at the edges so as to resemble an island in Bangladesh suffering a sudden monsoonal erosion.

When she prepared dinner, I’d peer down on some sort of object on the stove and do my best to ‘ sausage it’: i.e don’t think about where the stuff came from or what it consists of – just pile on the HP and tomato sauce, and shovel it in. Because what I was eating was technically food, and much of it had nutritional value even if was unidentifiable.

Why then did I so often accommodate the topographically challenged chocolate cakes, and the rice-gravel? Well it’s like this; the other member of the household was an absolute genius in the kitchen. But in order to enjoy his delights, I had to also suffer her atrocities. I had to balance it out. Not ask her to stop and also ask him to proceed.

Dan was extravagantly skilled, and would routinely knock up the best food I have ever tasted … ever. Dinner would never be mere tasty stuff on a plate. There were dishes; mix and match salads, chilli prawns, chicken curries, lightly pastried pies, green things which tasted better than green things should, and conjured so briskly. He’d come home, enter the kitchen and about five minutes later, aromas would waft into the lounge and almost bring me to my knees. It was cuisine.

My saving grace of course is takeaway; vindaloos from Singh’s in Nicholson St in North Fitzroy. Chilli prawns bagged from Coconut Palms in Smith St Collingwood. Sushi when I walk past a sushi shop. I don’t eat genuine junk. No Maccas or Hungry Jack and very little pizza (and gourmet pizza in any case). Mostly I eat stuff which doesn’t need a plate.

When Dan moved out to marry, we got a new tenant and during the interviews I was sure to insist tha, in general, we didn’t have an organized food regime.
If you like cooking for others then that was good, but me? “I tend to be out a lot.”

An all new culinary set up now. Alex worked in a restaurant and often brought home mouth-watering Italian fare. Not long after he moved in I noticed another delicious Italian meal he’d brought home in the fridge, begging to be eaten. He’d shared some of this food with us before, but only sometimes. I gazed at the squid and mussels and surreptitiously stole a few bites. The next night the meal was still in the fridge, which surprised me, and the next day too. Alex didn’t come in until later but by then … look I was very hungry, and how long could you leave a dish like this in the fridge before things started to go wrong with? So I just ate it.

The next day as I walked past his room Alex (who was a twat incidentally) said to me those words I had dreaded; “Michael, did you eat my dinner?”

“……..Yes.”

I immediately engaged in some spectacular genuflection, and made out I was confused about the etiquette of not eating food which is clearly not for you. He sat implacably at his computer, his back to me as he talked. It was creepy, him doing that. But while he lived in the house he painted two rooms without asking, and waxed only the top half of his torso too. He used terms like “chilling out” and “kicking back” constantly. He was a bit of a twit.

Which of course brings us to Masterchef.

Actually it doesn’t … I have Herbert Adams pies to prepare.