I love food.

I love eating it.

I love cooking it.

I love reading about it.

I love finding new ingredients.

I love feeding my friends and family.

 

My life story told through food.

Born in England to a family of very mixed backgrounds, marriages, travels and friends.

I learnt to cook at an early age because my ma’s menu of gammon and chips, egg and chips, gammon egg and chips, bored me. I do have to say my ma makes a great cottage pie with Branston pickle in, but this is a rare event.

My Welsh Gramma’s food was very of her era. All meat was cremated beyond recognition and veg had the life boiled out of it, if you could look at what you were eating and name it, it wasn’t cooked enough. My Grampa’s occasional cooking lent heavily on his eastern European birth as did his sister’s when she came to visit.

There was an early eastern European influence on my food, sauerkraut, opening the fridge to the smell of pickled herrings, borscht (mud soup)  and my favorite, my Aunty Eva’s (actually my great aunt) schnitzel, chicken and veal, not pork (and if you can’t figure out the reason for that, stop reading now). My Gramma hated Aunty Eva cooking in her kitchen, every pot and pan got used and there is a rule in our family, if you cook, someone else washes up. But Aunty Eva’s food introduced me to pierogi, schnitzel, strudel, meat loaf, goulash, chicken soup, timzie carrots, paprika, dill, noodles, sour cream, salmon that didn’t come out of a can, matzah balls, brisket and salted beef. Their food influence started my love of most things pickled or smoked.

My Grampa and family were academics and had travelled all over the world working and studying at various universities and institutes. Many of his family finally settled in Israel, this along with many lovely persian friends brings a middle eastern influence to my food. Their visits to our house, the food they brought and visiting them in return, allowed me to explore food in different countries. I enjoy the food of many cultures. Finding out about a nation's food, whether from those who have travelled here or on my adventures, has allowed an exploration of people, culture, politics, music, art, history and religion yet to be assuaged.

I grew up in a era of cookery programmes becoming more popular on telly, watched Floyd on France, Ken Hom, Delia Smith, Madhur Jaffrey, Rick Stein, Two Fat Ladies, Food and Drink (of which we still occasionally take the Michael) and many more. These programmes, visits to family, cookery books off family shelves, all fed my love of cooking. My first job was in a cafe in Durham and I loved it because it came with all the millionaires shortbread you could eat. I worked in kitchens as a student, watching and learning knife skills, how to bone a chicken, fillet a fish, make a veloute...

Why cuoca? The Italian word for a female cook? A young and crazy holiday spent on the back of the scooter of a Sicilian waiter, holding lemons in my hand that left such a powerful oil that the smell remained all day, eating tomatoes like apples, drinking limonata and trying to learn to drink dark bitter thick coffee without twisting my face. One day, he promised, when he owned his own restaurante he would write me and I would come back to Sicily, we would marry and have bambina...I wonder where that letter went.

Italian food and food culture, music, wine and sunshine have always been my first joy, comfort and ambition when it comes to the kitchen.I dream of living in the Umbrian hills, a glass of Barbera in my hand, sitting in my garden where I can breath in the scent of the lemons I am growing and booking my tickets for La Scala, whilst waiting for the potatoes to cool enough to make gnocchi with.

I have visited many different parts of Italy, food always perfumes the memories. Napoli is pizza and pickpockets, Venice in winter is gnocchi rich with cheese and a bowl of buttered spinach and wet feet from the high tides. One of the things I love about italian food is the ease, simplicity and lack of planning it takes. If I want risotto, I can open the fridge and see what’s there to make it with, and the next day I can find that bit of sweaty cheese, bread you could dry stone wall with and the risotto leftovers and make arancini. I have eggs, pasta, the other half of the sweaty cheese and bacon left from my hangover breakfast, I have carbonara. French food I have to plan, eastern european takes time to brew in the oven, Italian, I can eat now…

 

Why crazy? Well, when you see some of my cake decorating efforts, you will no longer question this. And then there is my approach to cooking. I read a lot of cook books, I watch a lot of cooking programmes on telly, I google a lot about food and I talk to people about the food they make at home, when a visitor I stand and help in the kitchen to learn. But when it comes to creating things in my kitchen, I rarely have the recipe in front of me. I take much of the information I have gathered, mix it up and out comes something to eat, sometimes successful, sometimes inedible.

 

This blog is about that journey, where the want to cook that dish has come from, where the information has come from. Which bits of method and ingredients I have used and the trials and errors I have gone through until reaching the most successful version of the recipe.

I hope this will encourage others to be brave and try other food experiments.