The Obligatory Introduction Post

To say I enjoy cooking would be something of an understatement. I've been out in the kitchen for as long as I can remember. As a young girl, I used to help my Dad cook the dinner at the weekends, of course by cook I mean stand on a little stool so I could reach the counter top and doing a lot of stirring, squeezing of tomato purée, and crumbling of oxo cubes. Occasionally, I was allowed to slice a mushroom under strict supervision - since they weren't going to slip and slide around - and when it came to roast dinners, the Yorkshire puddings were my domain. A couple of decades later, and now it's me in the kitchen pretty much every night cooking up a whole host of different meals.

Despite my love of cookery, I've never had any kind of professional tuition (well, unless you count GCSE Food Technology, which consisted of 'here's a recipe, now go make it'), everything I've picked up has been from relatives, cooking shows, or from pure experience alone. Now that I'm a bit older, and I like to think wiser (though the jury's still out on that one), I enjoy experimenting out in the kitchen, using tried and tested recipes as bases for new creations. In particular, one of my more experimental, and certainly creative, ventures in the kitchen has to be making my own homemade chocolates. Four years at art college, and pretty much the only time I make the most of my artistic side is when I play about with chocolate.

On a more savoury note, I love cooking with spices. Oriental and Indian cuisine are two of my favourite things to cook but for very diffeent reasons. With Indian, I love the combination of so many different ingredients all being mixed together to create such rich and vibrant flavours - that and I kind of feel like a witch standing over her cauldron creating something magical - except instead of eye of newt and batwing, it's a teaspoon of Cumin and a pinch of Garam Masala. When it comes to the more oriental cuisines, particularly Chinese, I love the simplicity and freshness, and the fast-paced cooking. To me there's something exhilarating about working with a smoking hot wok and keeping everything moving to create a fully cooked meal in five to ten minutes.

There are a couple of reasons that I decided to create this blog (and one big reason - namely one of my closest friends - that I actually got going on it). Mainly I wanted to share odd recipes and tips about cooking that I've picked up over the years, but I want to use this to talk about individual techniques and ingredients. I'd also like to use this blog as a place to document some experiments and generally share my love of cooking. It'd be nice if I could inspire someone out there to try something new, or give them an idea that they may not have otherwise had, but I'm not egotistical enough to believe that will be the case. I imagine that most of what I say here will have been said before, but if that's the case, I want to say it in my own way. And if nothing else, I want this blog to be a record for me, something that in years, when I'm old, grey and probably a bit more batty than I am now, I can look back on and still manage to rustle up a decent meal from.