I’m Kate I’m 35 my first sentence was ‘More gurky’(more turkey) and I haven’t stopped asking for more since. Elsie is my daughter she’s nearly two and loves food as much as me. If we’re not eating we’re cooking, seeking out ingredients, reading or talking about food. If we’re not feeding ourselves, friends, family, we’re feeding the chickens who give us their eggs or the garden that repays us with veg. Sometimes I feel that life is all about feeding, on bad days stuck in the house, tired, uninspired, it is relentless. If all I can muster are two overcooked fish fingers for Elsie’s dinner with me picking at the scraps while the cat whines like a chronic illness and the chickens weigh on my conscience because they are last in line at the soup kitchen, it’s a fat chore. But for me food can make or break a day, so embracing it is my way of keeping me and everyone else happy. It’s also a good activity to occupy a toddler without leaving my brain feeling like mashed potato in the process. Food is not just dinner it is who we are and what we do. There is also another reason for writing this blog. Before I had a child I had chronic wanderlust. I’d only have to see a postcard of foreign climes before declaring ‘I want to live there’. I don’t know what happened perhaps my nesting instinct kicked in, but that feeling has vanished, for the time being I’m happy to stay put. The desire to experience other places and taste their culture still tempts me though. Left to my own devices I could spend hours browsing the international food aisles at the supermarket as if they were displays in a museum. Give me an afternoon alone in any city and I will gravitate toward the Middle Eastern/ Asian/Chinese/Japanese/Polish etc food shops and rifle through the fantastical array of spices and condiments. And my bedtime reading is invariably cookery books or books about food or coffee. I really do feel that food (and coffee) offer a short cut to the heart of other cultures. I want my kitchen to be a place where I can travel through time and space. A place where I make, taste, smell as many authentic dishes as I can from as many different eras and locations. After all to be human is to eat and with that certainty there is never any shortage of things to cook.
