Welcome to a new phase in my life - Harper the food critic. Inspired by that dapper Matt Preston on Masterchef, my life's work now is to seek out good food and eat it.
Like Mr Preston, I am a hard taskmaster. I insist on the best. There must be hundreds of hundreds and thousands of thousands on a biscuit. Any less, and it is rubbish.But I am more than just a critic, I am very capable in the kitchen as well. Inspired by Gary and that Greek guy who says 'Straya' instead of 'Australia', I have been running Masterclasses for mum. The first one - how to make the perfect pie.
Make your filling. I quite chicken and leek. Once you have put your cooled filling in ramikins, you put pasty over the top. Now, you should run a strip about 1 cm wide around the rim. This will help the lid stick.
See? Easy.
Then bake them for about 20 mins at about 180 degrees. Here's a very important tip - eggwash on the lids will really crisp them up and give them a nice colour.
Mum then plated up the pie. I put my red cravat on and tasted. The filling was morish, the chicken cooked perfectly, the leek comes through, mum really got some taste in there, good strong flavours. The pastry was excellent, I wanted to go back for seconds. A very good job.
Next Masterclass...pasta. You need some pots, some water, some pasta and a spoon.
Or an Aldi kitchen set. Then you cook the pasta until it is al dente. Easy.
I am not the only judge - my colleagues Ava and Immy are also on hand to taste the food. Here, Ava and I are sampling a modern high tea - sausage rolls with sauce. A classic when done well. The sausage mince needs to be seasoned well and not too fatty. The key to sausage rolls is in the rolling - a nice consistent tube of meat on the pastry, which is rolled over carefully with the join on the bottom. Like the pies above, a little egg wash will give them a seductive colour. 
Later, Immi and I had a degustation menu to taste. We started with a twist on the legendary Anzac biscuit, the Anzac Slice. It was very good - moist but not sloppy and you could really taste the golden syrup coming through. Then it was crisp sliced Pink Lady apple with sun-dried sultana grapes from the Sunraysia district. This combination of textures really works well together.
I forgot my cravat on this day, so you can see my double chin. Lucky us foodies don't mind showing a bit of blubber - it's part and parcel of the game.
With my new calling, I have certainly put the pressure on mum to step up. This beautifully plated pear and rocket salad accompanied a simple mid-week dinner. In the past, we'd be lucky to see some random lettuce leaves thrown together and splashed with some commercial disaster of a dressing. I am happy to report those days are gone.I encourage everyone to cook for me. I promise to be a fair and consistent judge, and to smear a fair bit of what you give me on my face, on my clothing and even in my hair.
Bon appetite
Harper
