Diary of a Crap Housewife

by Jessica Rowe

  # CRAPHOUSEWIFE

  The morning I announced that I was leaving Channel Ten, I told Allegra how nervous I was about sharing the news with my colleagues and viewers in a few hours’ time. Kissing the top of her head and marvelling at her loveliness, I asked her what she thought about my decision.

  ‘A billion times happier Mummy,’ she said.

  And I couldn’t argue with that.

  Nor could I ignore the bright, beaming smile of my youngest daughter, Giselle. Now I can take her to school each morning. I had never been able to do that before as she started school just after I’d returned to full-time work. Now we hold hands—my big hand holds her hot, little hand that reaches for mine the moment we get out of the car.

  ‘What do you call a pile of cats?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, Mummy. It’s called a meow-tain. And that’s a lame joke!’

  ‘Yes, I know, that’s a shocker of a joke. How about I sing you a song! I promise it won’t be embarrass-SING,’ I replied, cracking myself up.

  ‘Mum, that is not funny!’ Giselle said. ‘You know I love you taking me to school, though.’

  ‘Oh, my baby bear. I love taking you to school, my darling heart.’

  It is never simply a choice between career and family. Life is never black and white, regardless of how much easier that would make it when it comes to all the big and little decisions that make up the wonder of our lives. Ask anyone, and family always comes first. Sometimes you have to lean in more to your family or to your career, depending on what stage you’re at in your life. Right now, I’m leaning in hard for my girls and my man. This isn’t old-fashioned; I’m a proud feminist and my brand of feminism is all about supporting the different choices that we can and should have as women. Who knows what lies ahead? But I can promise you that some things won’t change because this crap housewife won’t be putting away the laundry any time soon!

  BREKKIE BRUSCHETTA

  This is from the chef Ash Pollard, and it features in her Eat Me e-cookbook. It ticks all of my boxes: quick, easy and with minimal opportunities to stuff it up!

  Ingredients

  1 packet of bacon

  an egg for each person

  one punnet of cherry tomatoes

  a handful of fresh basil leaves

  a generous splash of olive oil

  a generous splash of balsamic vinegar

  as much butter as you like to fry your eggs

  one loaf of crusty bread

  Method

  In one frypan cook the bacon. While this is cooking, slice the cherry tomatoes in half, then put them in a bowl with shredded basil leaves.

  Ash also suggests slicing up 1 Spanish onion and adding it to the bowl (I left this out as I get bad onion breath).

  Drizzle with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and season with salt and pepper.

  In another frypan, melt some butter, and lightly toast your crusty bread in one corner of the pan, take the bread out, and crack some eggs and fry them how you like them.

  Once everything is cooked, first put your cherry tomatoes mix on the bread, then the rasher of bacon and top with the fried egg. Drizzle some extra balsamic if you want. Season with salt and pepper.

  Success rate

  Three out of four family members loved this! Peter ate his in about three seconds, Allegra ate hers and told me I should be on MasterChef and Giselle just ate the bacon on its own!

  2

  Cooking

  Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.

  OSCAR WILDE

  I am not a cook. Beep, beep, beep, beeeeeeep. The earsplitting sounds of the kitchen smoke alarm go off with such frequency in our house that even our three cats, Daisy, Alfie and Violet, cannot be roused from their sleeping, snuggly spot next to the mismatched socks on the dining-room table. Our cats still won’t budge even as I try to bang the corner of the smoke alarm sensor with the broomstick to turn it off before the alarm company rings to check if they need to send the fire brigade!

  When we bought the small French-imitation round table, I had visions of my daughters and me sitting around it, sharing a delicious roast dinner. The chook would be cooked to golden perfection, alongside perfectly crunchy roast potatoes and bright-green, glossy beans. There would also be homemade gravy without lumps, full of flavour and kept warm in a white porcelain jug on the table.

  The television and any electronic devices would be turned off without an argument. So the only sound, after we chewed our tender meat with our mouths closed, would be thoughtful observations from my daughters and conversation that they volunteered without any badgering from me about what they did at school. Their dad’s dinner would be plated up ready to be gently heated once he got home from reading the news on television. And by the time he got home, the girls would be upstairs, bathed and in their pyjamas, reading quietly in bed! Clearly this is not my reality. Is it any family’s reality?

  Our dining table gets so little regular use, apart from being the cats’ day/night beds, it has become a dumping ground for clean baskets of laundry, piles of yellow Post-it notes, blunt lead pencils and texta lids looking for a home. When I was growing up, my sisters and I rarely ate dinner in front of the television and sometimes I worry that my own daughters are developing antisocial habits since we don’t often all sit together at the table for mealtimes. But when everyone’s weary after a long day, the last thing I want to do is more nagging to get them to sit at the table. Instead, the pair of them are usually perched on stools around our kitchen benchtop, while I dance near the sink entertaining them.

  ‘Mum, you’re sooooo embarrassing,’ said Allegra.

  Oh, this was pure delight to my ears, so I started doing my next party trick, pretending to walk down an escalator on the other side of the kitchen bench.

  ‘MUM!’ said my eldest, while her younger sister laughed and laughed.

  The phone rang, interrupting my Logie-worthy performance.

  ‘Petee, shouldn’t you be getting ready for the news?’

  ‘I’m just going down to the studio now but I wanted to say a quick hello!’

  ‘Hello, Petee!’

  ‘What’s for dinner, Pussycat?’ I could hear the hope in his voice.

  ‘It’s chicken wings!’

  ‘Pussycat, you know I don’t like chicken wings. Even when I was little I hated them!’

  ‘But it isn’t pasta, Petee! You keep telling me you want to stay off the carbs!’

  # CRAPHOUSEWIFE

  Marinated chicken wings have become a welcome addition to my weekly dinner menu. Spaghetti bolognaise is always my number one choice but I know I need to keep mixing things up a little. As a small girl I used to love marinated chicken wings and I know my daughters will enjoy them too. Earlier in the day, I phoned one of my capable, organised banker friends for the ‘recipe’.

  ‘What goes in a honey and soy marinade for chicken wings?’ I asked, hearing the buzz of her busy office in the background.

  There is the briefest of pauses on the other end of the phone before she says, ‘Honey AND soy!’

  ‘Yes, but how much of each? I need specifics!’

  ‘Put in the same amount of each and add a slurp of vegetable oil.’

  Yes, it’s that easy!

  Another sweet piece of cooking wisdom that I’ve picked up from an equally capable friend, the darling Denise Drysdale, has been panko crumbs. What is a panko? It’s Japanese-style breadcrumbs, made from bread without crusts. Why panko? Well, according to Neesy they don’t absorb as much grease as standard breadcrumbs, making them super crunchy. And she’s right—these golden, crispy crumbs have elevated schnitzels, cutlets and rissoles into meals that my whole family will eat.

  Another game changer for my cooking is yet another piece of invaluable advice from Neesy: ‘God Almighty, turn the hotplate down. You have everything up too high!’

  And she was right (I’d asked her for the best way to stop burning my food).

  # CRAPHOUSEWIFE

  My husband is
well aware of my culinary and domestic shortcomings and he didn’t marry me for my abilities in the kitchen. Besides, I often tell him he’s welcome to take over the cooking duties but, like me, he doesn’t enjoy it. This means he has to deal with what I serve up each night. He’s not on Instagram so many of his younger newsroom colleagues who follow my #craphousewife posts will let him know what he’s having for dinner. One of his favourite producers, who talks to him through an earpiece during his hourly news bulletin, will tell him during an ad break how his evening meal is looking.

  ‘Pete, those chicken wings aren’t looking good tonight! It’s more charcoal than marinade. I think you should be picking up some Thai takeaway on the way home!’ says the producer.

  At least my husband has been forewarned.

  However, the girls and I are oblivious to this warning as we continue with our nightly routine.

  ‘Oh look, there’s your daddy on the television. Let’s say goodnight!’ I say to the girls.

  The three of us wave at the telly and I tell them how handsome their father looks.

  ‘Mum, that’s disgusting!’ says my eldest daughter.

  ‘Allegra, all I’m saying is that your daddy is handsome. And I love him!’

  And all my soon-to-be-teenage daughter can do is roll her eyes at her crazy mother.

  # CRAPHOUSEWIFE

  Apart from my vaudeville act, our evening routine usually involves me cooking while I try to supervise homework of varying degrees of difficulty. Since timing has never been my strong point, dinnertime suddenly creeps up and I find myself rushing around, turning up the oven or the hotplate too high (despite Neesy’s instructions) because of my delusion this will make it cook faster. And when I’ve got a spare second, I’ll bolt upstairs to the toilet since I’ve forgotten to go all day.

  ‘Mum, have you got a pencil?’ yelled Allegra from the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘I put a pile of them next to the green paint tube on the table yesterday,’ I shouted from the bathroom.

  Why is it that all the questions start once you’re in the bathroom? Or on the phone?

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not shouting! Come up here and ask!’ I shouted.

  ‘I need a pencil for my homework. And I need you to come downstairs now and help me.’

  ‘Have you looked properly? I’m sure there are some right next to the polystyrene green peas that I painted for Giselle’s Princess and the Pea Book Week costume!’

  ‘What?’ shouted Allegra.

  Quickly, I’m back downstairs, waving a selection of HB lead pencils that are exactly where I said they would be: on the table.

  ‘Mum, can’t you just tell me the answers?’

  ‘No, it’s not my homework. It’s yours …’

  ‘But I don’t understand what past perfect tense means?’

  ‘Umm, well.’ I’m tempted to tell my daughter that I have no idea what it is either. Thank goodness for Google when it comes to those tricky homework questions. During my time at school we didn’t learn any rules about grammar, as the English syllabus had focused on the concept that it was correct if it ‘sounded’ or ‘looked’ right. (Not surprisingly, this teaching approach meant I failed grammar during the first year of my journalism degree.)

  And even though I did three-unit maths in high school, I was as much in the dark about my youngest daughter’s maths homework too. I had no idea how to explain the number line and placement value they now use at school to teach addition, subtraction and fractions.

  ‘Mumma, I don’t get this Mathletics question,’ said Giselle, as she pointed at the downloaded maths program on my laptop that she uses for her homework.

  ‘Alright, let’s see. Oh, it’s fractions!’ I replied.

  ‘I don’t understand why I keep getting the wrong answer.’

  ‘Imagine that it’s a whole pizza and then you cut the pizza in half, and then you cut it again to share with your daddy,’ I said hopefully.

  ‘Mumma, you’re weird. You don’t make any sense! Can’t you just do it for me?’ asked Giselle.

  ‘No, I can’t just do it!’ I said, and then muttered under my breath, ‘Homework is such a waste of time.’

  More and more I find I’m talking out loud to myself and I also find myself sighing loudly when I sit down or get up. I think it’s a part of getting older. But back to homework, why is it such a punish? Haven’t we parents (and kids) got enough to do without filling our afternoons with even more work? Besides, I think it’s the teacher’s way of working out how smart the parents are!

  ‘Muuuuum, what’s for dinner tonight? Can we have hot chips?’ asked Allegra. ‘Please can we have hot chips? I love hot chips.’ Her persistent voice stopped my internal monologue about homework.

  ‘It’s chicken wings tonight,’ I replied, trying to sound upbeat.

  My daughter recognised that slight waiver in my voice and tried again with her questions.

  ‘What about pizza?’

  I knew I should have used a different food to describe fractions to her sister.

  ‘No—you know that’s our Friday night treat.’

  ‘Can I eat dinner in front of the telly? We could watch some of those YouTube Miranda Sings videos?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  I’m hesitating, aware that some mindless videos will give me twenty minutes’ freedom from a cross-examination about why I believe Cardi B is inappropriate and not a good role model for young girls.

  ‘That means yes! And when can I get my ears pierced? It’s not fair I have to wait until I’m twelve.’

  # CRAPHOUSEWIFE

  Although I keep my cooking repertoire simple with spaghetti bolognaise, chicken wings, schnitzel and sausages, there have been occasions when I will experiment and try something new. When I shared the Studio 10 desk with comedian Mikey Robins, he would always talk to me about restaurants and recipes in the commercial breaks. He recommended an ‘easy’ Jamie Oliver recipe that involved sausages. It sounded good and I knew that both my husband and daughters love sausages. Unfortunately, though, I again got distracted during the cooking process.

  ‘What on earth is this, Pussycat?’ asked my husband, as I dished up his meal.

  ‘I call it sausage surprise, Petee!’

  ‘It’s certainly a surprise!’

  ‘Come on, try it. And there’s no pasta in it,’ I said, as I spooned out sliced-up sausages, cherry tomatoes and garlic.

  It’s unusual for the two of us to sit during the week and eat a meal together, even if it’s called ‘sausage surprise’. Typically, Peter will come home from work and I’ll be wrangling our daughters in or out of the bath. There’s plenty of chaos, noise and laughter.

  ‘Pussycat, why can’t we be a normal family?’

  I’m not sure where my husband gets his ideas about ‘normal’ families, given he grew up in a noisy, loving big family. Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking on his part that he’ll have a quiet, drama-free night at home.

  ‘Surely other families don’t carry on like this!’ he said as he walked upstairs, hearing me ask, ask and ask the girls to please clean their teeth.

  ‘My darling, this is normal!’ I shouted, while he retreated back downstairs to zap his dinner in the microwave.

  # CRAPHOUSEWIFE

  Another time, when I was in the mood to mix things up, I cooked up a lamb roast with herb and tomato stuffing. The only reason I tackled this dish was because it was one of those supermarket-prepared meals. All that was left for me to do was follow the cooking instructions on the Jamie Oliver packet. Foolproof, or so I thought. Everyone ate up their roast dinner happily and I was feeling rather chuffed with myself. However, my heart skipped a beat when I was clearing up the kitchen bench and I noticed a small piece of rectangular plastic packaging that was still attached to the leftover roast. I didn’t say a word to my husband or girls about my suspicious discovery.

  ‘Petee, what did you think of the roast?’ I asked, scraping the leftovers into the rubbish bin.<
br />
  ‘Pussycat, it was delicious! One of your better meals,’ he replied, wiping down the benchtop.

  Quickly, I snuck into the bathroom to ring my youngest sister, Claudia, who is a professional chef, about my cooking mishap. She has always been my go-to girl when I had questions about use-by dates of food, whether something was cooked, or how long I could keep a barbecued chook in the fridge.

  ‘Claudo, I’m worried I’ve poisoned the family?’ I murmured into the phone.

  ‘WHAT?’ replied my sister.

  ‘Ssshh, don’t shout!’ I said, not wanting to be sprung hiding in the bathroom. ‘I cooked one of those Jamie Oliver meals and I cooked it with some of the packaging.’ ‘Oh … kay, don’t tell me how you managed not to see the plastic packaging. But don’t worry, there’s nothing in those squares. Everyone will be fine and the high cooking temperature would have killed off any nasties anyway!’

  And guess what? My little sister was spot on: no one got sick and I didn’t need to reveal my near-poisoning fears to my husband and children! Claudia is a wonderful cook and a Jamie Oliver expert, having worked for him at The River Cafe in London. She has also run other restaurants in London and Sydney. Apart from being a world-class chef, she has also been helping me, on the sly, in the kitchen for years.

  Before I became an out-and-proud crap housewife I used to pretend to be a good cook by serving up what Claudia had prepared for me! I’m ashamed to admit to ‘hosting’ dinner parties and serving up menus cooked solely by my sister. I would proudly pretend to our guests that I had whipped up the bruschetta entree, the main course of Moroccan lamb tagine served alongside couscous tossed gently with black currants. My sister would drop all of the dishes around earlier in the day and all I had to do was heat them up according to her written instructions. The main contribution I made to the meal was scooping the Sara Lee French vanilla ice-cream out of the tub and serving it with strawberries for dessert.

  One persistent guest almost exposed my ruse one evening when she wouldn’t let up on her request for the lamb tagine recipe. Thankfully, she didn’t notice the deep reddening of my face thanks to the pinot grigio we’d all been enjoying with our delicious meal. Shrugging my shoulders, I laughed loudly, while my honest husband became engrossed in rearranging the salt and pepper shakers on the table,