Since I was a teenager, cooking has always played a big part in my life. It started out of necessity at the time but has become a passion later in my life. My mother was, and still is, a self-confessed abomination in the kitchen. She made a decision early on in her marriage to my father that she felt quite lightheaded every time she stepped near the cooker so for health reasons, she respectfully removed herself from these situations. My father wasn’t much better, but he is from an era when men didn’t cook. Well, unless you count cremating food on a barbeque as cooking.
I started cooking as a way of eating something that wasn’t a ready meal or a frozen dinosaur shaped nugget. Not that I didn’t love it. After all, I’m from the ready meal era, where anything can be created in under five minutes in the microwave.
In the early days, I wasn’t very good or adventurous. A jacket potato here, a spag bowl there and to be frank, not much else in between.
This all changed at 23 when I packed up my little mini and set off on the adventure of a lifetime. Driving from the depths of Hertfordshire to Italy and spending six months discovering this beautiful country.
This was a trip I had been planning with great excitement, but also a few nerves. You see I had barely left the home counties up until this point, but I knew I wanted more and I knew there was so much more in the world to explore.
It was an instant love affair. Not just with food but also the people, the architecture, the atmosphere, the weather…The list goes on and on.
From the majestic basil lined hills of the Ligurian coast, to the rugged landscape of Tuscany and beyond, it was like nothing I had ever experienced before.
This was where my love affair, and indeed my skill for cooking, was really formed.
Between the Campari induced evenings I spent a lot of my time learning about the different cuisines, difference recipes and. of course, the different techniques from each region.
The richness of a slow cooked ragu from the north to the lightness of lemon infused pasta from the hedonistic lemons of the Amalfi coast, the flavours were as complex as their surroundings and its people and it’s safe to say, I was forever changed in the best possible way.
Over a decade later, my repertoire has definitely broadened but my foundation for cooking and creating recipes is still very much linked to those skills I learnt throughout Italy.
For example, the wonderful sofrito is a foundation of most recipes I cook and will continue to be so for many years to come.
Over the years, I have been thinking about how my mood plays a key part in the food I crave as well as what I cook. Especially in these troubled times where food has become such a pivotal part of people’s life, when so much else has been denied to us.
That is where this cookbook comes from. A book dedicated to recipes based on people’s mood and life events.
Because what we want to eat when we have had a bad day in the office, may be a delicious, slow cooked beef pie, but let’s face it, you have no mental capacity to spend hours in the kitchen.
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