So I need the protein and my liniment, but what I don't need is too much food because
it makes you feel too heavy when you're trying to run.
So I invented the mince-less hockey burger.
Just get a bread roll, pull the inside of it out.
You could use that for a hockey ball actually.
Then you butter it.
Sprinkle in some basil, pepper, salt, and now the farmed fried egg.
That's the little guaranteed stamp.
You break that inside the roll and then that goes under the griller.
When the white's cooked, sprinkle on some cheese, some bacon.
That goes back under the griller until the cheese is cooked.
There you are, the hockey burger.
Inexpensive, full of energy.
G'day.
I never think of those as commercials, more of little sort of cooking segments.
Hang on.
See, I don't advertise branded products, just sort of natural, healthy Australian food.
Like, you know, I'd never cook tin fish because, well, tin's a bit hard to chew for starters.
You need natural, healthy food.
So I'd just throw that in a pan full of butter.
Come and I'll show you.
So all you do is pop it in the pan and you cook it.
Now that's very simple.
You don't need to put flour or salt or any of that other sort of stuff in it.
In fact, you just pop it into the pan.
Oh, for instance, you want to know how long to keep it in there?
Very simple.
All you do, for instance, if it's the same colour as it was when you pulled it out of
the water, it's not cooked.
If it's brown, it's lovely.
Perfectly cooked.
Or if it's black, it's overcooked.
But don't worry about that because, look, there's plenty more fish down here and, in
fact, that's how I started cooking.
I used to live by the Tumut River, a spot very similar to this, and that's where I first
started.
I was about four and a half or five or something and I caught my first fish and pulled it out
of the river and I thought, well, it's a bit silly to have a fish that's not the right
colour because all the fish my mother had cooked were brown.
So I lit a little fire.
I ripped a bit of corrugated iron off a farmer's roof that was just down the road a bit, plonked
that on top of the fire and just dropped the fish on it.
No butter, no nothing.
And when the fish was brown, I ate it.
So I decided cooking was the most simple thing you could possibly do and I've been doing
it ever since.
Everything I cook is terribly simple.
But I not only cook food, I write about it and I draw about it, so I follow a whole sequence
through.
So rather than try and explain here, come back to the studio and I'll show you what
I mean.
Hi.
I've just written a story about down at the river bank and catching fish and all that
sort of thing.
Well, that's all right.
But if you do write a story, you've then got to catch people's imagination.
You've got to make them read the story.
And you do that, or the way I do it, is by illustrating also, by drawing a cartoon of
what happened.
So you're not only writing about it, you're making a visual about it as well as giving
everybody your cooking ideas as well.
Every day for 10 years I drew Ben Bo Yang, which was a comic strip about Australia.
But the drawing also required writing to go with it because comic strips are a combination
of drawing and writing.
So I wrote.
And the writing extended from the comic strip, which is only a few words, into actual stories,
lots and lots of words.
So I started to write articles for magazines, TV Week and New Idea and that sort of thing.
And I wrote my own cookbooks and found that the combination of drawing and writing was
good fun.
It actually worked.
And most of the stories I wrote, I wrote about food.
So I needed to cook.
I needed to know about recipes.
And that meant I had to cook.
I had to experiment with food.
So I spent a lot of time in the kitchen actually making recipes, actually cooking the food.
And then I'd put that in the article.
So I'd draw the little drawings about the food.
I'd write the stories and match them in with the recipes.
And all the recipes I do are very simple and quick and easy because I believe that being
in the kitchen should be fun.
But let me give you a recipe that you can cook.
Very simple.
If you get a carrot, some spring onions, an apple, cheese and some tomatoes or really
anything you can grab out of the bottom of your fridge that you like of course.
So if you've got all those things and make a little pie.
Now watch.
If for instance you chop up some tomato, some onion, grate a carrot, grate some cheese,
any type of cheese you like and chop up some apple.
And then put all that onto a piece of pastry.
So on goes the spring onion, the tomato, the carrot, the cheese and the apple.
That's all good tuck up.
Pop on a bit of pepper and salt.
Then that's wrapped up.
And if you wrap it up like that so it folds over.
So it becomes just a little package.
And then fold it over at the end because when that heats all the juices steam up and they
create steam and unless you've sealed it like that you'll have the problem that it'll leak
out all over the oven.
That's an egg.
Break an egg into a little dish, mix it up.
Then with a little paint brush just paint the egg over the pastry.
Now what that does is it makes the pastry go brown when it goes into the oven because
when the heat hits that pastry there's air inside the pastry and the air expands with
the heat and makes the pastry puff up and the egg makes it brown.
You'll see what it's like when we finish.
Pop on some poppy seed like that and that simply goes into the oven.
But just before we pop it into the oven let me go through the ingredients I've put in.
Carrot, spring onion, apple, cheese and tomato and they're chopped and grated.
Popped into the pastry, wrapped up, brushed with egg, a beaten egg and then some poppy
seed.
But that now goes into the oven and it goes into the oven for about 25 minutes.
But really the way I gauge it is when it goes brown, golden brown, it's then cooked.
So in it goes.
By the way the oven has to be 450 degrees Fahrenheit or 180 to 190 centigrade.
So into the oven it goes and my magic oven produces that already cooked.
And if you're going to give it to your mum pop a little flower onto it and make it for
her tonight when you go home.
Not only can you make it for your mum you can make it for a picnic or even make it to
take on an aeroplane.
Come on.
But it's not only the kids I go all over Australia doing cooking demonstrations you know in town
halls, shopping centres, really just about everywhere.
You know I travel hundreds of thousands of kilometres by plane but sometimes my travelling
is just simply like this.
When I was a wee boy my father used to work ploughing down in the streets, there's people
everywhere, ploughing down in the paddocks part of my back, probably a bit down in the
front.
Anyway I used to carry the food down to my father, he'd be going round and round in circles
on a tractor and he'd just put it on the engine of the tractor and keep ploughing for about
20 minutes and the food would be cooked.
And he had quite a system where he could in fact cook anything.
But I don't spend all my life in the city.
I've got a property near Geelong, it's called Soho and each weekend myself and the family
go down there, in fact I spend as much of my time down there as I can.
Soho's about 900 acres which is pretty big, it's mainly flat sort of land but very picturesque
because it looks out over the heads and the bays and it's a wonderful place just to go
to to relax.
And I bought it so I could run all the sorts of animals that I want to run.
I have not only cows but calves and horses and goats and pigs and all that sort of thing.
It just becomes a farm like a farm should be.
And because I was brought up in the country I've got a great love for it, maybe not an
understanding but it lets me just sit on the balcony and remember what it was like when
I was a child and now when I see my kids running through the fields or playing in the creek
it just gives me a little chance to think back into Tumut where I was brought up.
I have a great love for the land and I do farm but I don't see myself as an artist when
I'm painting, I don't say hello, I'm a little artist or when I'm cooking.
For instance I never wear a chef's hat mainly because I find it difficult to walk through
doorways with a dog.
I like the fact that it's a challenge, one of the things that I'm interested in with
fresh natural healthy foods, not processed and manufactured foods and so I'm in it.
I make fresh foods and natural foods, it's all done out in the paddocks so I've got an
affinity with what I'm doing here and with what I do in the kitchen, it all blends in
together.
Hey yabbies, here we go, come on, who's going to grab them?
And for the kids it's great, they can play in the creeks or the dams of course where
they yabby and they spend most of their weekends catching yabbies which then they cook for
their dinner which saves me a lot of work.
So there we go, that's our dinner.
That of course will be entree.
Well that's my weekend but after the peace and quiet of Soho it's back to Melbourne and
Monday mornings earning the living doing TV commercials for the Victorian Egg Board.
And now I'm going to serve this to all the mates I've invited for brunch.
The names we're not going to have time for, you know Tom, Mary, Hannah, Humma Humma.
No.
Right?
But we don't need them.
No but if you're there...
I started doing commercials because I felt that the commercial world was an opportunity
to actually give cooking ideas to masses of people and you see I work for the Egg Board,
the Victorian Egg Board and I work for the Australian Dairy Board and the Dairy Board
is butter and cream and cheese and yoghurt, all that sort of business.
And so it gives me the opportunity to, the commercial gives me the opportunity to push
those products to make children understand that they should be eating that instead of
a liquor stick or something.
With the commercials I write all my own copy.
I've just done say a radio, a series of radio commercials.
I did 60 commercials and I write them and I produce them because that way I can assure
that I say what I want to say.
I class commercials as important communications.
To make a television commercial takes quite a long while because there's sound and light
and cameramen and all their little parts have to be perfect.
Whereas my job in a television commercial is relatively simple.
Got to be a bit faster.
Little faster.
Righto.
Let's do it.
G'day.
Brunch.
A combination of breakfast and lunch.
It's not in my mind at all mate.
It's always a bit soul searching to see yourself on a television commercial because number
one you never look as good as you really believe God should have made you and you see that
you make mistakes and you stumble and you don't have enough time to really do exactly
what you want to do.
And so I find commercials that I do are things I personally don't particularly like looking
at.
The commercial world is a very lucrative one.
You make a lot of money very quickly but then again you're only on front of camera for a
short number of years whereas somebody that makes motor car tires or digs holes in the
ground has got a longer period to make money.
So when I finish my commercial world I suppose then I go out and dig holes in the ground
and bury all the commercials I've made.
I'll serve this to all me mates.
I've invited for brunch.
Actually they're a bit late.
What?
At your place?
Left out.
Look that's the one.
In the closer.
Just the eye.
Nothing.
That's the game.