#13 Jessica Prescott – Melbourne, Australia
There are three recipes from Jess Prescott’s new cookbook One Pot Wonders which I now make every single week – Vegan Green Pesto, Butter Bean Hummus, and Really Good Potato Seasoning. These simple little basics help me inject colour and flavour into everything I make for the fam.
This is kind of Jess’ thing; offering really helpful hacks to home cooks. Her cookbooks are warm, funny and inclusive, and she helpfully instructs her followers and fans about everything from sourdough starters, fussy toddlers and healing postpartum food.
She shares her ideas about keeping flexible in the kitchen and not overthinking cooking when you’re burnt out (from COVID-19 lockdowns or just the ups and downs of motherhood).
Her insanely delicious chocolate cookies will not last a week in your house. They are well worth the bake. Scroll down for the recipe.
Name: Jess Prescott
Occupation: Mother of two, Cookbook Author, Co-founder of Mama Goodness
Location: Melbourne
Family members: Jess, Andy, Louie (5yo), Jude (2yo)
We are a fun-loving family of four who live on the Preston and “Rezza” border in Melbourne. Andy is a hairdresser and studying to become a primary school teacher (he’s gonna be THE best teacher). I’m a cookbook author, co-founder of Mama Goodness and a Postpartum Doula. Our boys are clever and hilarious little humans who love super heroes, dinosaurs, drawing and climbing all the things a mother doesn’t want her child to climb.
When I got pregnant with Louie, Andy and I were living in Berlin and hosting boozy dinner parties multiple nights a week. We didn’t have a dining table so we’d squish everyone into the living room where we would eat on cushions on the floor with the balcony doors wide open in summer and the heater cranking in the winter. When not hosting, I had a lot of time to do whatever the heck I wanted, and cooking took up a large chunk of it.
It was my New Years resolution for 2013 to be as vegan as possible. This meant being flexible when traveling, but ended up extending to cutting myself some slack when pregnancy and breastfeeding aversions and cravings kicked in. My kids and husband are vegetarian and I still occasionally eat eggs or the crusts of my kids toasties so I technically am vegetarian too, although my passion lies in vegan cooking.
I had grand ideas about having a vegan home and letting my kids eat vegetarian food when not at home – for example pizza or ice-cream with their grandparents or cake at a birthday party. What I didn’t anticipate were the eating challenges we’ve had with one of our children that has forced me to either let eggs and cheese into our home or let peanut butter be their only protein source. Funnily enough, they don’t care for pizza, ice-cream or birthday cake at all!
I used to think that everything should be made from scratch and I now realize how ridiculous that is. I still love cooking, but at the time of writing this I am burnt-the-fuck-out and have decided that ordering food that has been lovingly prepared by others is my self care for the rest of this brutal year. When I am home alone with the kids, I feel like all I do is prepare food. Breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, sandwich. It’s doubly exhausting when you need to make a separate meal for an extremely fussy eater, so these days I try to make things that can be served deconstructed for the fussy one but are still delicious for the rest of the fam.
My mum is the one who instilled me with my love of cooking and to this day, most of our conversations revolve around food. As well as all the baked goods, there were homemade cheese scones with tinned tomato soup, risotto from a packet, frittata and when I stopped eating meat – roasted veggies with avocado on the side, which to this day is still one of my favourite meals.
I was obsessed with the Moosewood Cookbook and Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen as a child and these two books are what shaped me into the type of cook I am today. Aside from those, I have mountains of books that I love but dare I say, the books I cook from the most are my own. They say to write the book you want to read, right? I guess I have written the cookbooks I want to cook from.
At the beginning of the first COVID lockdown I shared a sourdough video on my Instagram that really took off and had literally thousands of people began cooking sourdough with me. That was a fun time but now I am so busy that my poor sourdough starter is neglected for long stretches of time. When lockdown was super hardcore, my postpartum food delivery business was busier than ever and my husband was home 24/7, so he started cooking more, which has been an incredible help and a fun thing for us to do together. Quite often, he will get things started and I will swoop in at the end and finish the meal off, which we both love. I guess that’s what it’s like to have a sous chef!
Mama Goodness is a postpartum meal delivery service that I co-founded with Doula and Naturopath and all round angel of a human Vaughne Geary. We both had the same idea of creating delicious and nourishing food to support people after birth and decided to do it together which was a giant leap of faith because we barely knew each other but we just knew that partnering was the right move. As well as the food packs we deliver each Tuesday, we handcraft products that are safe to be used during pregnancy and in postpartum.
I had Louie in Berlin so I was away from my family but had friends arrange a meal train and it was the best. I felt so cared for and I wanted to create a business that makes new mums feel as held and supported as I did in those first few weeks of being new parents.There is so much emphasis put on the birth, the birth, the birth – and while I agree that this is really important, very few people are properly prepared for the first few weeks at home with a baby and it is simply not supposed to be this way. We are not supposed to do this alone. So, it can be really fucking hard. And then it passes and most people forget how hard it was.
Motherhood looks very different for me than I thought it would. When you have the level of fussiness that exists in my home, you will do anything to get your kid to eat, even if it means buying muffins from Woolworths or tiny little crackers in tiny little packets. In saying that, we have come a long way and despite having a lot more processed food in our home that I imagined we would, we also have a lot of fruits and vegetables.
Mealtime is always at the table and always consists of a starchy carbohydrate, a protein and at least one fruit or veg. We serve it up and then let the kids decide how much to eat. This isn’t always easy, but it’s important for us for a number of reasons – one being that we don’t want mealtime to be stressful and another being that kids need to be given the opportunity to learn about their own bodies and to stop eating when they are full. We also always make sure that there is one ‘preferred food’ for our fussy one, so that even if he doesn’t want to try anything else on his plate, there is enough of something he likes for him to fill up on.
Our weekly shopping list consists of the following items: Bananas, apples, pears, blueberries, watermelon, broccoli, potato, sweet potato, carrot, cucumber, spinach, eggs, bread, cheese, pasta, peanut butter, crackers. If we have these things, we have what we need to feed the kids which means everything will be ok. Whether or not we add additional things depends on my state of mind and ability to write a shopping list, and whether or not I have a book to write!! Sometimes I am incredibly organized, other times I wing it.
My kids LOVE food shopping, but coronavirus kinda-sorta put a stop to that. They also love ‘helping’ in the kitchen so when they are in the mood for that, I surrender and let the chaos unfold. We got into veggie growing at our old home with the hope that that would be the secret to ending our fussy eating situation. Alas, despite the excitement of little tomatoes and giant zucchinis appearing on plants, they didn’t make it into anyone’s tummies.
My time-saving tips for other parents? One Pot Wonders baby! But also, make extra. ALWAYS make extra. If you have enough to put some in the fridge and some in the freezer, even better. I’m not suggesting you buy a microwave but we were given one when we moved to Australia three years ago and holy guacamole it has been a game changer for my stubborn, formerly-microwave-hating self.
World’s Healthiest Chocolate Cookies
You know when you have friends coming over for an afternoon playdate and you realize you have nothing to feed them? That’s how this recipe was born.
I whipped them up one afternoon when my brother and sister in law were on their way over and I had nothing to offer them. My sister in law lost her shit and I scrambled to write down what I had done so I could create them again and again for her (and now, everyone else).
If you own kitchen scales, they come together in moments and cook just as quickly. They are also free of refined sugar and wheat so, tick tickety tick in the healthy treat department. I should also mention that the dough can be flattened and cut into dinosaur (or other) shapes. Always a big hit in our home!!
160g (5½ fl oz/1/2 cup) maple syrup
200 g (7 oz/generous 3/4 cup) natural peanut butter
90 g (3¼ oz/scant 1 cup) almond flour
90 g (3¼ oz/scant 1 cup) quick oats
1½ teaspoons baking powder
30 g (1 oz/1/4 cup) cocoa powder
40 g (1½ oz/1/4 cup) hemp seeds
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
pinch of salt
Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F/gas 4) and line a baking tray with baking paper.
Combine the maple syrup and peanut butter (heated gently if necessary, to loosen) in a bowl. Add the dry ingredients and mix to combine.
Roll the mixture into 15 balls and place the balls on the lined baking tray. Flatten them until they are about 1 cm (1/2 in) thick and bake in the hot oven for 8–10 minutes, or until you can smell them.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool on the tray.
The cookies will keep in an airtight jar for up to 1 month (maybe even longer, but I wouldn't know as they are snaffled in mere minutes in my home).
Recipe kindly supplied by Jessica Prescott
Photos are by Ilsa Wynne-Hoelscher Kidd
