About This Site

My relationship with food

For many people food is a boring necessity. They’re happy eating the same things day in, and day out, and find cooking a chore.

I am not one of those people.

Food makes me happy. Cooking is one of my favourite ways to relax. If it’s a biological necessity to consume three meals a day, why shouldn’t those meals be tasty, varied, and creative?

My approach to cooking

I’ve been cooking since my early teens, the only hobby I’ve consistently maintained over that period of time. Notwithstanding a couple of years of evenings and weekends in a pub kitchen, I’m entirely self-taught. No doubt I have a lot of bad technical habits, but I also have a decent command of ingredients and flavours too.

In my professional life, I’m a technologist. I have a deeply held need to understand how things work, and this carries over to how I think about food.

I’ll often make a dish more than once in a short space of time, tinkering with it until I’m happy with the outcome. I enjoy researching similar recipes online, and take inspiration from others.

It’s not unusual for me to enjoy a meal in a restaurant, then attempt to recreate it from memory in my own kitchen, with mixed success. I’ve been known to do the same with dishes that my dining companions have chosen, or even menu items that nobody ordered!

In the kitchen, more than perhaps anywhere else, I’m creative and curious.

This website

In 2012, I joined Instagram, and started sharing photos of my dishes there, and on my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Over the years, many people have asked me to share recipes: this website exists for those people.

Although I sometimes use slightly unusual equipment, everything on this site can be achieved in a domestic kitchen.

I’ve attempted to categorise these recipes fairly sensibly - you can search by cuisine, or by meal type. Vegetarian recipes are explicitly marked as such.

I don’t tend to cook vegan, but most of the vegetarian recipes are easily adapted. Except those which require cheese, of course: I’m very openminded when it comes to food, but most vegan cheese is, honestly, a crime.

The recipes

I can’t claim that anything here is an authentic expression of a particular cuisine. I do try to use regionally appropriate ingredients (for example I’d avoid using olive oil in Asian food), but the pursuit of “authenticity” (whatever that is anyway) is only really interesting in a purely academic sense.

Equally I can’t claim to have invented the entirety of every recipe here - I take inspiration from many different places - but I haven’t knowingly plagiarised anything.

All I can really say is that these are the things I make, and I generally like how they turn out. I hope you like them too.