A Summer Venture

The way I learnt to cook is actually a rather funny story.

My mother insisted that the way to learn to cook is simply by watching. She tried this method for all of about 5 years. It was a continuous cycle of forcing me to watch her cook and me attempting to pay attention before ending up babbling on about this and that as she cooked. I’m just not a visual learner.

In the summer of 2012, however, something happened.

There isn’t very much to do in The Land of the Arabs during summer, especially when you’ve reached my age. Having moved to England years before that, I had all of two friends left in The Land, and both of those friends had gone on summer holidays. So there was me, my laptop, and my books. Re-runs of Friends and re-reading every book in my vast collection can only entertain for so long.

After receiving yet another monotonous ‘Read your book’ response from my mother upon informing her of my growing boredom, I got mad. I was mad at myself for not being able to come up with ways of entertaining myself. To calm myself, I logged onto youtube and began one of my many video marathoning sessions of that summer. I came across a video by SORTED Food and, rather arrogantly, proclaimed that if they could do it then so could I.

And so began my cooking venture.

I’m not sure I’ve ever actually followed a single recipe to the dot. I can be fairly cheap and lazy when it comes to buying ingredients for meals and making the actual meal, respectively. If it calls for courgettes, I use aubergines. Need some baking soda? Throw a little under double the amount of baking powder in there. Pasta needs to be cooked? Boil some hot water and pour that on before putting it on the cooker. Needs exactly 2 tbsp of oregano? I scoff in the face of exact measurements. Spices were made to be eyeballed.

Now these methods do sometimes fail me. But they work more often than they fail.

I’ve created this space to put up pictures of meals I’ve made and recipes I’ve ‘followed’. Not necessarily together. There will be the occasional picture of a successful vegan omelette with no ensuing explanation or recipe.

Because I can.

Featured image taken from: http://weknowyourdreamz.com/sun.html