YOU'VE GOT THIS
In her new book, Alice Zaslavsky shares her skills in the hopes of building confidence in the kitchen
People tend to put themselves in boxes when it comes to cooking. A few failures, and you tell yourself you're a “bad” cook, as if that's a forever thing. In her third book, Better Cooking, Australian broadcaster, cook and writer Alice Zaslavsky aims to disrupt this line of thinking — wherever you may be on the cooking continuum.
“It's not just beginner cooks that call themselves `bad' cooks. Even people who have been cooking for decades will still put themselves in that box, and all you're doing is setting limitations and restrictions on yourself.”
As the title suggests, Better Cooking isn't about being a “good cook.” It's about improving. Loosely organized by effort — easier to more complex — it radiates with culinary possibilities.
Zaslavsky designed the compendium of 100-plus vegetable-forward recipes to boost confidence and build skills. Joyful and empowering, she didn't want readers to feel as if they were being lectured. Instead, she hopes they “trip into learning” while having fun.
Zaslavsky, a MasterChef Australia “almost finalist,” former English teacher and humanities department head who lives on the Mornington Peninsula south of Melbourne, describes herself as a growth mindset person. “I've been in a classroom. If I walked in there and said, `OK, so we're going to learn something really hard today. You won't be good at it, but let's just see how you go,' even that is still too growth mindset for how people think about cooking. So, what I want people to know is you don't have to be a `good' cook. Because even the best chefs in the world still have off days.”
Having a sense of humour may not be up there with attention to detail or multitasking in terms of prescribed kitchen qualities, but to Zaslavsky, it's essential to becoming a better cook. Making mistakes and moving on is part of the process — we might as well be able to laugh about it. “I will still burn stuff. I will still forget things in the oven or walk away for a moment and char my pine nuts, and that's fine. It's actually funny,” she says. “That's something that comes with removing the expectations we set on ourselves.”
The recipes in Better Cooking are eclectic by design, ranging in inspiration from Aussie childhood classics and Melbourne restaurants to Zaslavsky's birthplace of Tbilisi, Georgia. As varied as their influences may be, they all fall into Zaslavsky's definition of Better Cooks of the 21st century: adaptable, veg-forward, low impact, low effort and high return.
“It needed to be a manifesto, in a way: `These are the points that make a better cook of now.' And actually, some of those points aren't so new. Some of them go back to granny skills or skills we've lost.
“So, what excites me about this New Age of cooks is that they are coming back to low-waste cooking or finding shortcuts or being adaptable or whatever it is, and we can continue to evolve as cooks as well. I'm getting better every time I cook,” she says with a laugh.