Word to the Wise

There is nothing unconfident cooks like hearing more than other people’s kitchen disaster stories. It makes it easier to persist when renowned cooks spill the beans on their past failures.

In her 11th cookbook Family Favourites (ABC Books, $25), Sally Wise dispels the kitchen goddess myth with a series of laughout-loud anecdotes.

Wise reveals the first recipes she cut from the English Woman’s Weekly as a girl did not serve her well in her early days of marriage.

“Often they failed dismally and at the worst possible moment, such as when visitors were due on the doorstep for dinner,” Wise says. It is also a pleasant relief to discover the renowned cook and radio presenter also faced a nightly battle with picky children (her son Alistair, of Sweet Envy fame, had a knack for hiding his peas under a tiny mound of mashed potato while daughter Stephanie ate ice-cream only if it was warmed in the microwave).

Wise says Family Favourites is derived from an old diary, known in her house as “The Red Book”, packed full of magazine clippings and handwritten recipes.

All have served her family well over the years and include handy ways of sneaking more vegetables into the diet of youngsters, such as her “subterfuge soup”.

“I believe that cooking should be easy and fun and the recipes I have developed over the years reflect this,” Wise tells TasWeekend.

Wise and her husband Robert have created their own food paradise at their home near Molesworth, from where she runs the Sally Wise Cooking School.

“We have created a perfect environment for what we want to foster here,” Wise says.

“The place and space to grow our own produce, a little cooking school with a huge kitchen area and now a large outdoor bread oven that Robert recently built.”

There is even an honesty box at the gate filled with preserves that match the seasons and often bread and other baked goods.

Wise will host a new addition to the annual Derwent Valley Autumn Festival in New Norfolk tomorrow. She describes Taste of Our Valley as a producers’ lane where visitors can sample the best food from the region. Sally Wise will host booksigning events at the ABC Shop, in Hobart, on Thursday at 1pm; Volume 2 Bookshop, in Launceston, on April 23 at 12.30pm; and at Not Just Books, in Burnie, on April 24, at 1pm. She will be talking all things food in the ABC tent at Agfest next month