yumi stynes (aka the zero f*cks cook.)
When did you learn to cook?
I remember being fresh out of high school and having NO IDEA about cooking. I made two-minute noodles; awful, awful curries; and dastardly pasta. One Christmas my sister gave me one of those pie-maker appliances WHICH I LOVED. I lived on pies for about two years. Puff pastry, a tin of tuna, some corn and some cheese. The worst thing was waiting for them to be ready. I had no idea how to even be patient enough to wait the twelve minutes for the damn pies to cook!
Who taught you?
Eventually I learnt to cook because I quit my bartending job and started working as a dishwasher in a really busy cafe. It was disgusting work, hard and dirty but crazy fun, and I loved being in the atmosphere and chaos of a busy commercial kitchen. I started paying attention to what was going on with the food, asking questions, then when I got home I would try to replicate what I’d seen.
How much has your mum influenced your cooking?
My mum wasn’t much of an influence on me at first—or I didn’t think so! But then I was living out of home and friends would come over for meals and they would really get so excited about me showing off some Japanese cooking! I felt kind of obliged to slap together Japanese meals and people’s delight and accolades were so over-the-top that I started doing it on the reg—for the applause! Later I spent more time in Japan and was ridiculously inspired by the food and tried to keep as much of that as I could in what I make at home. But the way my mum, Yoshiko, has really influenced my cooking has more to do with the way she incorporates fresh vegetables, fruit, simplicity and good ingredients. There is nothing in her repertoire that could be described as ‘greasy’ or ‘unhealthy’.
First fail? First success?
Learning to cook is about having a series of ‘growing’ experiences … Getting your first decent knife is a game-changer. A lot of first-time, learning cooks are trying to do it with tools that are just awful. And it makes everything suck! It makes the interaction with food quite
