HAPPY HOUSEWIFE: Jessica Rowe gets set for a brand new kitchen adventure
Self-confessed “Crap Housewife” Jessica Rowe is getting ready for another kitchen adventure – and it’s one that stirs memories of years past.
At a time when Ins tag ram and Facebook feeds were flooded with meals worthy of a MasterChef winner, Jessica Rowe felt at a loss. Surely, she thought, she couldn’t be the only mum who was incapable of presenting such a glorious feast each night for her family?
Rather than wallow, in 2017 she launched a project to help make herself – and others like her – feel less inadequate. And so the Crap Housewife was born.
Each night Jess would post a photo of the not-so-impressive meals she was putting on the table for husband Peter Overton, 54, and their two daughters Allegra, 14, and Giselle, 11. From burnt sausages and mash to baked beans on toast, no meal was deemed too unphotogenic to grace her social media feed.
“I did it for me to start with, because it made me feel better,” she tells The Weekly today. “But then what I have loved about it is that it struck a chord, with so many other people going, ‘Oh my God, that is me! That’s what I feed my family!’”
The Instagram feed sparked a website (craphousewife.com) and then a book, Diary of a Crap Housewife. Soon, Jess found herself flooded with requests for tips and tricks in making food the whole family could enjoy. And, needless to say, it didn’t take long for advertisers to take note of her willingness to try new things in the kitchen (even if she wasn’t always successful in pulling them off). That’s a line of work that has led to her latest, previously unlikely, project.
“Who would have thought me, as a Crap Housewife, would be a cooking ambassador for Bing Lee,” she laughs delightedly of this unlikely new role, in which she will head up their March Cooking month.
“But what I love about this role is that it’s essentially celebrating the simplicity of quick, easy meals, which is me all over.”
Ahead of Jess’s involvement, Bing Lee commissioned some research into what Australian families turn to for their go-to meals. And while we may fancy ourselves as gastronomists, it turns out that one in three Aussies still prefers meat and veg for dinner – the dinner of choice in Jess’s childhood and now, equally, her own family’s regular request.
“Meat and veg, chicken and veg or steak and salad – and that’s my life and the lives of so many other families across the country,” says Jess. “We want to keep it simple and not spend so much time in the kitchen. That fits in beautifully with my philosophy, which is you can’t be great at everything. So let’s embrace what we’re good at, look for shortcuts, recognise our shortcomings, and use that time we save in the kitchen to do other things that bring us joy!”
For Jess, that usually includes some kind of creative endeavour. “I like to wear a hat that matches my meal choice,” she confesses. “We were having nachos for dinner the other night and I thought, ‘You know what? Rather than folding the washing, I’m going to make a nachos hat!’ I probably spent more time making the hat than the actual nachos but it turned out quite well. My husband was like, ‘What are you doing?’ My elder daughter thought it was embarrassing – which really, is our purpose, to embarrass our older children. But my younger daughter laughed, I laughed and it brought me joy. And now, more than ever, we need to look for those small moments of joy.”
Joy is very present today on our set as Jess whips the vintage vacuum cleaner back and forth.
“I loved vacuuming far more as a child than I do now as a grown up,” she laughs. “I remember I used to love pushing that big red button with the heel of my bare foot and it would roar into life. The big bag at the back would get all puffed up and there would be this particular ... almost dusty smell.”
Today Pete is in charge of cleaning while Jess’s domain is the kitchen. “Not surprisingly, my mum wasn’t a great cook either,” she laughs. “So it was pretty simple and what I cook for my kids – sausages or steak or chops and veggies.
One big treat Jess recalls from growing up was when her mum, Penelope, would whip out her electric frypan to make a rice and veggie stir fry. “It felt very fancy to have stir-fried rice. She’d also do honey soy chicken wings, which
I make for my kids now. Another thing she’d do was serve us up what she called a ‘tasting plate’. It felt very grown up. It would have cut up carrots, tomato, cucumber, whatever veggies we had, some cheese, some crackers. And we’d eat it before dinner
– that way my mum would get some veggies into us. My girls love it as well.”
The idea of using appliances to make things easier is something Jess has eagerly embraced in her much more modern kitchen. She regularly whips out an electric frypan of her own, including to create the recipe opposite. Not only that, but Jess is also the proud new owner of the
appliance of the moment
– the Philips Airfryer.
“Kids will eat pretty much anything that’s crumbed,” she explains, which is why it’s come in so handy. “You can do a schnitzel in the air fryer and you’re not using as much oil so it’s healthier as well as being quicker.”
Next on her list is a recently purchased, currently unused, Sunbeam pie maker. “I’m looking forward to making some little chicken pies,” she says. “And I do love mince because you can’t stuff it up really. So I could try and make a Bolognese pie – that might be something a little bit fancy.”
And if it works out, Jess hopes that she’ll be able to create these recipes again, maybe for a larger audience. “I’m planning to do a Crap Housewife podcast in the next couple of months but what I’d really like to do is Crap Housewife TV,” she says. “This is me dreaming, but we all need to have our daydreams, don’t we? I enjoy doing silly kitchen things and filming me attempting to cook meals … so, stay tuned!” AWW
“You can’t be great at everything, so let’s embrace what we are good at, look for shortcuts.”