Secret ingredients

My dad gave me a special present the other day. It was some salt. Not just any salt, but his current prized possession - Tetsuyo's Truffle Salt.

It is from my dad that I inherited my OTT love of food and cooking. He tends to be pretty OTT with it as well, even though he is 80+. He has never in his life entered the portals of a supermarket - anywhere, let alone in Hobart, even though he lives in West Hobart.

He shops only at Wursthaus Kitchen, Lipscombe Larder, Hill St Grocers, Raw and Wursthaus at Cambridge. His favourite product at the moment is his salt.

As his prime focus in life is flavours, the salt is used to base his meals around. The meal he had made for himself and my mother on Saturday was Wurtshaus Minted Lamb Sausages, with Dads special truffle-salted mash. He insisted I sit down and eat with them, so I did.

He treats every mouthful of food as if it were a sip of wine - extremely reverently.

He watches with eagle eyes as I fork some mash, urging me to sniff it first before tasting it! I sample a small amount of it. It is indeed beautiful, and very different to normal mashed spud!

He then tells me to stop eating and wait for it to pass down my throat, then tell him what I taste.

I won't go any further with this description of the meal, as I'm sure you'll get the drift!

He also has another current favourite - ghee. He cooks everything in it, and swears by it.

His wine consumption is identical. He really savours his wine. Mum and Dad have both red and white with every meal. It is drunk from their Reidel glasses, which are carefully and ceremonially washed, dried and replaced on the mantlepiece after every use.

Dad is aging, as is natural, but his devotion to food, its buying, its planning and preparation, then ultimate eating is as it always has been. He's a slave to perfection in his food. He lives for 'The Cook & the Chef' (and footy). He slavishly re-lives each minute of Simon or Maggies meals weekly as he recreates them in his own kitchen. He tastes them, then usually pronounces them as being fantastic recipes, with Simon or Maggie yet again held up as the paragons of style in cooking!

He can be a right pain in the arse, but geez he knows his food! And thank god he shares some of it with me!