If there is one thing you need to know about Jasmin Weston, it is that she loves food. How else would a former marketing professional establish a successful career in the Australian food creator scene, if it were not for the fact that food has always had a magnetic pull?
A pull that has brought her 382k followers on Instagram alone.
From easy meal fixes like leftover mince rice paper rolls to a hearty slow cooked shepherd’s pie, Jasmin cooked and recorded all of her dishes for the world to see. Overnight, what started out as a passion project for friends, turned into a space for aspiring cooks seeking quick and approachable meals on busy weeknights. Now, two years later, this self-taught cook has collated all of her culinary knowledge into her first ever cookbook “Everyday Eats”.
I sat down for a Zoom chat with her on a sunny Wednesday morning. The morning was not without its technical challenges, but in a matter of minutes I was giddily showing her the copy of her book I had on me. Here is the edited transcript of what we discussed:
I’m so excited for you and there’s so much that you need to be proud of. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I’m a beginner cook turning into an intermediate one. So, when I skimmed through the book and saw two pages on balancing flavours, I thought, this is the best thing ever!
Because it’s so genius. No one really talks about how people struggle with balancing flavours. It’s evident in your book that there’s been a lot of thought put into it. So can you take me through the journey of having the idea of “Oh, I should write a cookbook” to this book right now?
It was long and it was tedious, but the concept has stayed the exact same. I remember when I first sat down to write the book in December, 2022.
I was a beginner cook when I started writing this and obviously everything was going well for me on social media at the same time. So, the concept came to me as I was reading “Salt, Fat, Acid and Heat”, which is another really great cookbook, but it’s not for beginners because it’s really quite overwhelming.
And I remember reading that going, “oh, this is so great, but not a lot of people are going to read it.” So I took a lot of information from that and put my own spin on it. I just put all of my lessons that I have learned over the last 12-24 months, prior to starting my social media journey.
Did you take notes? For example, “Oh, this should be a top 10 tip” or something to that effect?
In high school, I used to watch cooking videos in my spare time. Not really intending on ever doing what I’m doing now.
It was just what interested me at the time. When I first started cooking, it was when I moved back into dad’s place, I just took everything that I had been watching online and just executed it in the kitchen. When you follow a recipe on a blog post or anything like that, all of this information is in the blog post, but no one actually reads it.
I never read it.
Exactly. But that’s the information that people need to read. So I was like, how can I encapsulate that and put it into a really fun, digestible way so that people can refer back to it whenever they want to. And that was also the objective behind the book. And I want this book to be the book that you have on your counter the whole time, whatever recipe you’re following, you can refer back to it because there’s so many tips and tricks in there that are universal, whatever dish you are cooking.
This book is going to help you understand why you need to do what you need to do to make the dish turn out the way it should turn out.
Would you argue that this was the cookbook that you wished you had when you first started your journey?
That was the concept. I thought I needed to write a book that I wish existed when I first was teaching myself how to cook.
And it is the cookbook I wish existed. And I hope that it doesn’t matter if you are just teaching yourself how to cook, or if you’ve fallen out of love with cooking, or even if you just want it for the recipes, there is something for everybody in that book whether you’re moving out of home for the first time, or you’re in university or whatever it is you want to cook for your boyfriend, you and your partner just do that together.
I feel like the demographic for this book is so large because there is something for everybody in it.
I’m a university student, and I work two jobs as well. And so, part of that is, I feel lazy to actually stand by the kitchen, cook something, and eat for myself, you know? I would rather just order out. And so one of the biggest things that university students struggle with is time. What would be your case for university students to drop their takeout menus and pick up a spatula and cook?
I think a lot of the time when we order out as well, it’s not like the food is crazy good. And I think the whole instant gratification with, you know, all these delivery services is that that part of food has been stripped from us. But as for the time aspect, I generally just think it comes from a lack of education. Like I know cooking can seem really quite overwhelming and stressful.
But there are so many things you can do that can alleviate that and can streamline the process of cooking. Initially, yeah, it may take you a little bit longer, but the more you do it, you’ll find that it’s a lot quicker for you to just whip yourself something once you have your kitchen and your pantry stocked with all the staples, as opposed to ordering something and paying 10x the amount.
Yeah. Well, like money is not exactly something out of the box, so it’s either you choose, you pick your poison, it’s either time or money. But once you find your flow in the kitchen, and alleviate all those stresses, like using “mise en place’. and having a kitchen set up really nicely, then cooking is so easy just to get into a flow state and becomes almost therapeutic, which is also something that I talk about in my cookbook. But again, it just comes from a lack of education and us thinking that the easier route is, ordering.
Could you elaborate more on the tips for beginner cooks to alleviate that stress?
Prep everything that you need beforehand. I think a lot of these days we follow the recipe step by step and we cut the onion when we need the onion and then we cut the parsley when we need it. But in my book, I focus solely on trying to get people to mise en place, on the first step of the recipe.
I say mise en place because doing that, chopping everything that you need and then going into the cooking component, honestly, 70 percent of the stress is gone just from doing that. And I don’t think a lot of people talk about that enough.
Once you do it a few times and you will see the time you’re spending in the kitchen reduced.
I think for university students especially, or let’s just say beginner cooks, when they first start to approach cooking, what do you think the roadblocks are and how do you think your cookbook can help?
Especially university students when you don’t have a lot of ingredients on hand. And I think when you read a recipe that has like 17 ingredients, it really overwhelms you and you’re like, ‘Oh my god I’m not making that I’m just gonna get Uber Eats.’
I talk about it in my cookbook, if there is a recipe that you want to make just bite the bullet and buy all the ingredients and just keep doing that and in a few months’ time you’ll have your pantry and your fridge stocked with all the staples then all you need to do is buy your meat, your protein, your veg and things like that and once you have your kitchen set up in a way where you have all of the fundamental staple pieces, cooking again just becomes not stressful.
I really tried to put emphasis on that in the book. Just stock your kitchen and pantry. I know it’s going to be more of an upfront cost, but once you have all of those things, then you also have more creative freedom to do whatever it is that you want to do, you know, at home.
One of the things that it seems like, when you look through the cookbook is that design and colour were very important to you. Why were these elements something that you were very particular about?
I obviously have a lot of personality and I’m quite vibrant myself. So I definitely wanted a lot of colour in the cookbook purely just to reflect the type of person and the type of content I create, but mostly I wanted cooking to be fun.
And like I said, I want people to find their own individuality in the kitchen and their own style. And I think with that I had to put emphasis on cooking should be fun and it shouldn’t be overwhelming. I needed a book to reflect that. I needed bright colours. I wanted it to be an easy read. I wanted it to be visually appealing.
And I also didn’t want it to be a textbook. I remember being in uni and opening up the textbook and just being so overwhelmed with all the words on the page. And the same with “Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat”. I didn’t want to give my readers high school PTSD. I wanted them to be able to flick through the book and just find a piece of information really quickly.
And to be able to read it in a couple of sentences and understand what it is that they needed to do. So the colour, the illustrations, the page architecture, everything was considered just so that the reader had a really easy time flicking through the book.
Is there a standout recipe that you like?
See, I can’t answer that because cooking is subjective, people love different things for different reasons.
You know cooking is all about making a dish the way you like it, seasoning it to taste the way you like it. Just because my recipe says it’s a certain way, doesn’t mean that it needs to be that way. You can add more garlic, more chilli, more pepper, if that’s what you like. Cooking is a lot about trusting yourself and knowing what you like in the kitchen.
And like I said, finding your own flow and finding your own individuality, your individual style in the kitchen is so important. And I think that has been lost a lot because people think they need to follow the recipe to the letter. That’s not what cooking is. It’s about having that there as a guide, and then using your own knowledge about what you like and what you don’t like to make that dish your own.
Thank you so much, Jasmin. This has been really great.
I had no idea you had the book. I don’t know who has the book these days ’cause it’s not out yet, but it means so much to hear that you can see what I’ve put into it.
You really can!
“Everyday Eats” is available now on paperback in stores nationwide.