I have of late had to bare my soul as a cook on TV in front of an audience with an unfamiliar stove and equipment – a very stressful experience. The thing is that I rather enjoy cooking and, assuming that you aren’t forced by some draconian marriage vow to cook every day for the rest of your life, it can become the most therapeutic of hobbies. Rather like a culinary alternative to golf, where instead of improving your swing you’re improving your knife skills. TV cooking is similar to cooking in a restaurant kitchen, only it’s a producer breathing down your neck rather than an apoplectic, cleaver-wielding chef.

Self-preservation taught me that the only way to survive was to ensure that my segment was devoid of slick cheffery. Instead I decided to focus on the way that I cooked; a way unimpeachable by those who may actually have mad stove skills. As I tend towards being a layabout who loves a shortcut, I gravitated to looking at ways to cheat in the kitchen. So here, for all you aspiring cheats, are the first five commandments.

1. Never labour if you can rest

This is central to all cheats’ cookery, whether it’s ensuring that someone else does the washing up, letting the oven do all the work with that braise while you have a kip, or making risotto with higher starch vialone nano rice that doesn’t require constant stirring like arborio. Into this also falls the cheat’s prerogative that if you can get someone else to do it then you should; whether it’s leaving your children to stir polenta for hours on end or buying chicken stock instead of making it. Sister to this rule is that quicker is better, so look for ways to remove time-consuming steps. Well, unless it’s slow-cooking, which is an excellent cheat.

2. Admit nothing, justify everything

Any teenager or politician will tell you that you can get away with an awful lot if you deny everything. It also helps if you can spin the truth so that you justify everything. For example, the reason why you don’t peel the onions for your stockpot is not because you’re lazy, but because the skins add colour to the stock!

3. Fake it until you make it

True fact. It was Aristotle who first suggested that if you act with virtue, you will eventually become virtuous, or in other words fake it until you make it. So don’t be afraid to put simple things in fancy crockery to make them look classier. Simple pumpkin soup becomes a thing of beauty with crisp curls of bacon, a few toasted pepitas and young peppery nasturtium leaves. It’s just a matter of distracting the eye from the mundaneness of what lies beneath. Also don’t be embarrassed to buy a roast chook. Heck, you could serve that chook with mash and a trendy gravy of tamarind and slippery jack mushrooms to make it dead posh.

4. Let the produce do the work

The final cheat is uber hip at the moment, so hip in fact that mainstream chefs have purloined it. You see, a smart cheat lets good produce do the work. You have to do less to it to make it shine, whether it’s a ripe tomato that only needs to be served with a few flakes of salt or a succulent peach served on crushed ice.

Footnote:

I am sure you have worked out that there are only four points, rather than the promised five. I should have changed the intro to reflect this, but I was too lazy. And that’s the thing you learn once you start cheating – pretty quickly you stop caring about the process and focus on the outcome. Which is really the fifth commandment – or if it isn’t it should be.

For more articles of wisdom from Matt Preston be sure to check out here.