One dish closer - About Me

Food is my favorite topic. Fact.

I call it a passion. My friends and family say I'm obsessed.

Whatever you call it, it’s clear who is responsible: my Dad, he’s a chef.

Good food was a core part of our family life. As soon as we could chew, my sister and I ate the same meals as our parents. I am sure this is why neither of us is fussy. Trying new things was encouraged, but never enforced. It was interesting and exciting.

I got into cooking young too; I liked baking as a kid and helping out with dinner. By 10 I was experimenting on my own and as a teenager I worked as a kitchen hand in my Dad’s restaurant. Growing up in Sydney, Australia, one of the world’s most multicultural cities, I also learnt to appreciate and understand food from different cultures.

I now live in the UK. British food still has a bad reputation overseas – grey meat, overcooked vegetables and stodge. This may have been true for much of the 20^th century but times have changed. Since the 1980s and 1990s, increased public interest in food has seen the restaurant scene transform, particularly in London. There has also been a renewed focus on local and seasonal produce amongst those who value quality or who are concerned with ethical issues, such as sustainability.

When I started this blog in July 2010 I hoped that it would provide another avenue to explore my passion. It has; it turns out that as well as cooking and eating food, I love writing about it too.

It was this that inspired me to do a Masters in the Anthropology of Food. *Cue bemused expression*. I can’t possibly explain food anthropology in a sentence here, but I have done my best at explaining it in this post. The course was truly fascinating and covered so much more than I ever anticipated.

The focus of this blog is the food I am cooking and the food I am eating. I share my own recipes, my experiments with other people’s and my experiences of dining out in London and on my travels. In 2014 I also added a page on food anthropology to share some of my readings and musings from the Masters.

I hope you enjoy reading my blog as much as I enjoy writing it. To get you started, here are some posts which have received good feedback from some of my regular readers:

Updated March 2017