Favourite chef? Stephanie Alexander and/or Maggie Beer
Tom
Date: 4/05/2009
What's your favourite restaurant?
Piaf, Grey St, Brisbane.
What's your favourite ingredient and why?
Fried or frying garlic, ginger and onion because the smell reminds me of home.
What’s your favourite meal of the day – breakfast, lunch or dinner?
Any, as long as I am with my partner, good friends and it’s a sunny and warm - not too hot - day.
What do you prefer, chicken, beef, seafood or tofu, and why?
Anything that I crave at the time; chicken particularly when craving Torres Strait cuisine and beef particularly when feeling down and need an iron boost etc etc.
What dish would be the way to your heart?
Any meal from the Torres Strait not cooked by me, e.g. Filipino-inspired pork in a blood gravy, poso (rice cooked in a coconut leaf woven basket).
What’s your favourite tune to cook to?
Moses Tav - the best ever - from PNG (Papua New Guinea), particularly “Daba Dikana” or “Jessica Uru”. Google Moses Tav on the internet to get an idea of his/her (gay PNG singer) style of music.
Describe how you felt during the MasterChef audition?
Uncertain, not knowing where this could lead me. Having a redundancy late in 2008 – was this responsible of me or should I be looking for another legal position.
What do you think you’ll learn from being on MasterChef?
How to cook without having to rely on a recipe – cooking from the heart, basically, rather than from the head.
Are you nervous about cooking for the judges and why?
Not at all – I welcome any constructive criticism from judges because I am a home cook and not a trained chef.
Who do you cook for the most?
My partner.
What three ingredients would you take with you to a desert island and what would you cook with them?
Nothing because having been born and grown up on a virtually deserted island allows one to be very self-sufficient.
If you were having any three people, alive or dead, over for dinner, who would they be and what would you cook for them?
Dawn French, Ben Stiller and Jack Black and I would cook whatever I felt like the day before. Alternatively, my mother, my great Aunt and grandmother to show them who I am now.
What inspired you to go on MasterChef?
My redundancy from law.
And how do you like your eggs?
Depends. If a pie at 2.00am, then fried eggs. If feeling healthy, I would have poached eggs.
