Aysha Buffet remembers mashing the potatoes in one of her favourite Filipino dishes just so she could tell her classmates she had the Aussie staple for dinner "like all the cool kids".
"It's funny how, being an Asian person in school, all you wanted to do was have a normal meal," the Melbourne drag queen explains in a show where she cooks chicken adobo with her mum.
"Now, when you think about, 'Ugh, I had mashed potatoes for dinner last night'. Oh my God, do you smell that? It smells basic."
On the new ABC-funded mini-series, Gourmet Lazy, Aysha and other culturally diverse Australian performers and their mums take the audience through family staples that their parents cooked for them as a child.
Creator Brendan Wan, an Australian-born Chinese producer, says he wants to show off simple and homely meals from different cultures, but in the grand, cinematic style of Netflix series Chef's Table.
The show — funded as part of a $5 million initiative to provide support for Australian creatives during the COVID-19 pandemic — also features a Chinese tomato and egg stir-fry, Italian white wine pasta, and fried scones prepared by Indigenous comedian Dane Simpson and his mum.
'I can cook pasta, but I'm not good at curries'
For Melbourne comedian Urvi Majumdar, it was her first time cooking a dish with her mum from start to finish.
They made a hearty Indian dish called khichuri, which Urvi describes as similar to a vegetable stew with rice and lentils.
Her mum, Sruti Majumdar, learned the dish when she was Urvi's age, and Urvi says she's learning it now "as a rite of passage".
She says she wants to learn more about her Indian culture — including cooking — so that she can pass it on to the next generation if she has children.
"Growing up, it was always my mum cooking."
Like Aysha, Urvi also recalls "trying to fit in" at school by bringing sandwiches rather than curries.
But now that she's older, she says she's not trying to "be as Australian as possible", and appreciates her Indian culture.
"They can come to a stand-up show, but it's always like me trying to filter my stories.
"So [the cooking show] was a really good wholesome experience."
'Your ordinary could be my special'
Brendan's mum arrived in Australia as a refugee in the 1980s, when Indonesia invaded East Timor, and his dad is an Indonesian-Chinese migrant.
He says even though it's exciting to dine at Michelin-starred restaurants, it's the basic foods his parents cook that he would always go back to.
One of his go-to meals is a bowl of rice with spam, a fried egg and some soy sauce — something he says his mum cooks when she's "really lazy".
He also points out that "basic" is relative, highlighting a dish made by Molly Daniels and her mum, Robyn Butler.
"[They] made white wine pasta. It sounds quite fancy, but it's really pretty simple," he says.
Brendan says he is also fascinated by how a recipe changes as it gets passed down the generations.
"When you pass food down from one generation to the other, the main [dish] stays the same, but there's always these slight changes."
'It just never tastes exactly like my mum's'
Aysha says she struggled to recreate her mum's dish perfectly, even after taking "sneaky photos" of her little black book of recipes.
"I know that I'm putting not enough of something in there or too much of something. And it just never tastes exactly like my mum's.
"As most Asian people cook, we never really measure things, we kind of just know the feel of it, or the taste of it."
Throughout the show, some cast members also grapple with having to convert a dash of salt or a drizzle of oil into standard measurements.
"We're going to add a teaspoon of salt," says comedian Annie Louey, as she eyeballs roughly how much salt her mum is adding to a bowl of egg yolks and whites.
"No, no," replies her mother Jian Xian Louey.
"Half a teaspoon," Annie suggests, before Jian Xian decides it is more like "a quarter".
Annie says her mother taught her how to make the dish when she moved out of home last year, adding she doesn't want her mum's recipes to be forgotten.
"When I was not sure what to cook, I would think of what are some of my favourite meals, and I will get my mum to message them to me," she says.
"She tried her best using WeChat, or I would go over to her place and take notes.
'Be proud of who you are'
Annie says she feels very proud of the dish — comprising tomato, eggs and spring onion — because it is "very Chinese".
"My parents have instilled that in me, to be proud of who you are," she says.
"It's a very lovely flavour combination so whenever my mum cooks it, I get really excited."
Aysha says it's exciting to see culture being passed down through the generations, and recalls the pressures of growing up in Australia.
"Our parents come over here, and they have a really high expectation of their kids to do really well because of where they've come from," she says.
"Through the struggle that I've had with my family over the years of not being a serious uni student, and gravitating towards a more creative industry, it was an unknown for my family."
But fast forward to the present, Aysha says she knows her parents are proud of what she's done and achieved.
She says her parents accept her for who she is, not just because of what she does for work, but also as a "proud trans woman".
"[It's] incredible to be able to showcase that on camera, and have people within the Asian community see that it is possible to be a creative and to drift away from your parents' original plan, and still have a really beautiful and flourishing relationship with your parents."
The first episode featuring the Chinese tomato and egg stir-fry will be released on ABC TV & iview's YouTube, IGTV and Facebook accounts at 07:00am AEDT. Four more episodes will be published weekly at the same time.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMia2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIxLTAyLTE3L2F1c3RyYWxpYW4tbWlncmFudHMtc2hhcmUtZ291cm1ldC1sYXp5LW1lYWxzLXJlY2lwZS1jdWx0dXJlLzEzMTU2NTA40gEnaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAuYWJjLm5ldC5hdS9hcnRpY2xlLzEzMTU2NTA4?oc=5
2021-02-16 18:36:00Z
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