About ...

In the beginning ...
I was born ahem years ago in Hong Kong, my mother from mainland China and my father a Scotsman from Crieff in Perthshire.  My father was a fashion photographer in those days and my mother was a leading Hong Kong model. Both were obsessed with good food and due to the nature of their lives they were always out at the best restaurants, entertaining and being entertained.  They were partners with another couple in one of the largest floating restaurants there at the time and so food played a very big part in my life from a very early age.

Early travels ...
The Chinese are a nation of food lovers and even in the humblest homes, good quality food is deemed an essential and through food the Chinese show their respect, regard and love of other people both in the family and with visitors. The Scottish too are a very hospitable race and the Scottish bed and breakfasts stick in my early memories, of travelling around with my parents, for the amount and quality of the food offerings.  No sooner did you arrive on their doorstep before you were offered tea with sandwiches, scone, cakes and biscuits. Breakfasts would so varied - not just bacon, eggs, sausages, mushrooms and tomatoes but also black pudding, skirlie (buttery pan fried oatmeal with onions) potato cakes, Lorne sausage (the square variety) or oatmeal coated kippers and so forth.  It seemed that the host and hostess spent a lot of time making sure their visitors didn't starve to death by offering food at every available opportunity!

With this background, together with living in Hong Kong, England, Zimbabwe (or Rhodesia as it was still called at that time), Saudi Arabia and Spain, I grew up tasting all types of cuisine and was encouraged to help in the kitchen to prepare the family meals and to help out with all the entertaining my parents did.  Some of my happiest childhood memories are of sitting in the avocado tree in our back garden in Zimbabwe, where I spent 7 years living with my Scottish auntie, peering through the dense green foliage and surveying the scene that made up our farm.  Acres of vegetables and fruits including passion fruit (or grenadillas as we called them), mangoes, melons, lemon and oranges, macadamia nut trees, asparagus, gem squash and more.

I was given a few rows of the vegetable garden to tend to myself and I sold the excess on a little wooden table on the roadside outside our front gates as pocket money.  We also had free ranging chickens, guinea fowl, geese and ducks, both for eggs and for eating.  We had a 36 egg incubator at one end of the kitchen table and it would be my job to turn the eggs each day and spray the duck or goose eggs with a fine mist of water. I would keep a count of the days on the calendar so that I would know when they would be due to hatch.  I was shown how to hold the eggs up very carefully against a bright light bulb or candle flame to see if I could make out the growing chick inside. On the big day of hatching I would eagerly look for signs of that first crack and listen out for the cheepings of the new arrivals.  The guinea fowl chicks were so cute in their spots and stripes, the ducklings were adorable with their big webbed feet and rounded beaks and beady dark eyes. 

We also bred New Zealand rabbits for the table which to begin with we all refused to eat ourselves due to the fluffy factor!  However one day when stripping the meat off a rabbit which had been simmering away slowly in the kitchen ready to feed to the dogs and cats, my auntie licked her fingers without really thinking about it and then remembered it was "Roger rabbit" she was denuding of flesh!  She was at first horrified and then realised how silly we were being about eating the rabbits we bred for the meat trade.  After all we ate the chickens and other poultry we bred!  So, from that point on our dinner table regularly featured rabbit as well and delicious it was too. My favourite rabbit dish of those days was just the tenderest morsels of the loin simply pan fried in butter and light seasoning - yum!

Due to the political circumstances happening in Zimbabwe I eventually left there and was put into a boarding school in the Lake District to do my "O" and "A" levels. Boarding school cramped my style somewhat after all the freedom I had free ranging over miles of bush and farmland on horseback but one thing I do happily recall is spending time in the communal kitchen in the 6th Form block making crab apple jelly, damson jam and sweets like fudge and Scottish tablet!

Adolescence to adulthood ...
From school I went to university in London where I studied Business and Finance and it was here that I really started to have to learn to cook properly and fend for myself!  It was at this stage that I also bought, with my very own money (and there wasn't very much of that to spare in those poor student days - come to think of it, not a lot has changed on that front!), my first of many cook book purchases from one of those discounted book shops.  It was a basic book covering staples like roasting and simple meals and desserts but from there I went on to buy more and more cook books and tried out many recipes, slavishly following them precisely weighing out the ingredients.  By the time I left university and set up home with my first husband I was a reasonable cook of basic everyday meals and had given up following recipes slavishly but instead used recipes as inspiration, substituting other ingredients and not bothering too much over precise measurements except where it really matters like in baking, which has its own chemistry.

From that point my interest in cooking really took off and I liked nothing better than to be given an excuse to spend time in the kitchen.  Friends and family were constantly being invited to eat at our house, everything from casual buffets to more extravagant dinner parties complete with floating candles and place names at each setting!  Even our wedding buffet made me realise that I could do better than the professional caterers we had hired could do.  One comment which really touched me and made me realise that I was a reasonably good cook by many people's standards was made by a then neighbour, Dominique.  She was French and married to an English man, both of them accomplished cooks and entertainers and who's parties we loved to go to as the food and company was always excellent.  I had invited them round for a special surprise 30th birthday party I had planned for my husband and initially Dominique said that unfortunately they had already accepted another dinner party invitation and therefore couldn't make it.  She then rang me back half and hour later to say that she and her husband had decided to cancel their previous invitation (on what excuse I never asked!) and they would love to come to my party instead as they loved to eat my food! That was a huge compliment in my eyes (I'm easily pleased!) and maybe it was then that I started to consider cooking as a "paid hobby."

The "paid hobby" ...
With small children to run around after and a husband who worked long and hard, the next phase of my life saw us moving from the Essex/Suffolk borders to the middle of the Cambridgeshire Fens (to cater for having my much loved horses on the doorstep rather than at livery and room for all the other animals).  With the children now going to play school and infants I started to have a little spare time and I started to cater for small local events like the local dog and horse show's hospitality tent for the judges and various friends and friends of friends asked me to cater for their special occasions ranging from dinner parties (where the hostess hid me in her kitchen and I had to tell her what was in everything so she could pretend she made it herself!) to cocktail parties with canapés, special birthday buffets and weddings.  

Through one of my friends I then tendered for a job to cater the local Citizens Advice Bureau's Christmas dinner. Much to my surprise my tender was accepted and so I catered for the first event where all the guests were complete strangers to me.  It was a success and they booked me the same day to cater for the same event for the following year and so it went on until I moved away from the area.  One of the Directors attending those buffets contacted me separately one year to say that he wanted to know if I could cater for his 30th wedding anniversary meal on a particular day.  Unfortunately my diary was booked and on asking whether I could do either the preceding weekend or the one after their preferred date, I could only offer them a date a whole month from their preferred date.  He said he was disappointed but rang off, only to call back the next day and say that he had talked to his wife and they had come to the conclusion that they wanted me to do the catering so they would just delay their 30th wedding anniversary celebrations till a month later when I was available to do it - no pressure! 

These compliments were so rewarding for all the hours and days I spent menu planning, sourcing products, arranging tableware and waitressing hire when needed etc not to mention the actual food preparation, cooking and transportation issues. 

They were good times though and fitted in so well to my busy home life as I could accept or turn down jobs according to when it suited me and the family. I didn't make a lot of money out of this as that had never been the intention at the outset and when catering for friends or family one always feels the need not to charge what they would have to pay the professionals to do.  I also didn't have the purchasing power the professional caterers have and was using the normal retail outlets to buy the ingredients along with a couple of cash and carry places.  I didn't advertise apart from leaving a few business cards at events I catered and had to spend money getting my Chartered Institute Environmental Health certificates in food hygiene and buying various equipment. 

However personal times moved on and due to my husband's job we needed to move down to Wiltshire and at this stage I left all the catering behind me.  Following a period of personally difficult times during which I got divorced (amicably) and went back to full time working as an Office Manager, I didn't really have much opportunity for indulging too deeply in my food fantasies and cooking just involved producing tasty meals for the family and dinner parties became much more casual (no more floating candles and 5 courses!) but my interest in good ingredients, interesting recipes, food events and great cook books never waned and I continued to add to the cookery book collection!  By this time I had met the man who has become my second husband and it was he who made us venture into the pub world.

The Pub world for beginners...
Neither he nor I had any pub experience in terms of management, only for drinking and eating at lots of them!  Nevertheless we were not deterred and deciding we wanted to live dangerously and throw caution and all good sense to the wind we attended a course on pub management, attained Licensee qualifications, wrote a business plan and were granted a tenancy on a quaint country village pub in Norfolk.  Giving up reasonably well paid jobs and throwing life savings into buying the business we moved up to Norfolk and became Publicans.  What a shock to the system that was!!! 

Considering ourselves reasonably intelligent, educated, business savvy and relatively sane and sensible people who had done their research and written "the best business plan I've seen in years" (quote from the Area Manager of the Pub Co. from whom we bought the pub business) - it is hard to fathom out why we really were so unprepared for this new life.  Pub life really is a lifestyle and not just a job and hats off to those who have managed to do this successfully for their career life!  The first 3 months passed by in a flash of arguments, disagreements about just about everything to do with the pub, a learning curve so steep we needed crampons just to stay alive and bucket loads of sweat and some tears!  However we eventually settled into what was entailed in running a successful pub and learning to live with your business 24/7 and with each other - sounds like this should be left to a different blog maybe sometime in the future! 

From an operational point of view I ran the kitchen and restaurant side of the business whilst my husband did the wet (drinks) side of the business and the front-of-house.  We had various part-time staff and all the trials and tribulations that go alongside being an employer as well as the good sides.  It came as a huge surprise to me that I actually did not enjoy the food side of the business at all!!  Let me qualify that as that as it isn't strictly true .... I loved the menu planning, the sourcing of great local ingredients, the food preparation and organising the themed nights or function room special events but the actual service time when food orders were arriving so fast and all at once it seemed, the kitchen was organised chaos, the ovens were going full blast as well as the salamander grills, the fryers and the heated food cabinets making the kitchen a sweat shop even in deepest winter.  Waitresses were flying in and out of the kitchen dumping the dirty dishes or complaining that table 3 were taking forever over their starters and maybe we should hold their main courses up a while to save them being cremated by the time the occupants of table 3 had stopped gazing deeply into each other's eyes and got on with eating their starters!  My nightmare was always the waitresses coming in and saying a party of 8 or more had just walked in, not booked and wanted to eat - oh joy!  With me, myself and I being the main cook and a bit of a perfectionist in terms of wanting the meals to all go out at the same time regardless of whether the party was 2 people or 20, I hated these large parties just walking in with no warning.  When I knew I had large parties due in I would get extra help in to the kitchen and extra waitressing staff lined up which meant everything ran more smoothly.  Anyhow, we coped, we always did and thankfully we never had anyone walk out or refuse to pay.  We had lots of devout regulars with whom we used to joke that if they ate 4 times a week with us we'd give them Sunday lunch for free.  Our regulars used to call me up if they were returning home late from somewhere and knew they would miss our regular food ordering times and place their orders over the phone and say they were on their way!

There are lots of tales regarding catering for the public in the pub environment but maybe over the coming months (if I can keep blogging and anyone shows the remotest signs of interest!) I shall relate them over time rather than on this "About..." page.  Suffice for now to say that the catering I had previously done when I knew how many I was catering for, what they would be eating, what time I was going to serve them etc etc was, in my eyes, much more preferable to the manic few hours of the pub trade food service twice daily, every day, week in and week out. Don't get me wrong, there were many, many good times and lots of great comments, customers became and still are friends, many great memories to relate and treasure but I can't say I miss the trade too much.  We did the pub trade for three years in all and then made a decision to return to being well paid for half the numbers of hours, helped by the then looming smoking ban coupled with the Pub Co through which we had our business deciding to sell out to another Pub Co and the full "tie" the new Pub Co were going to insist on introducing - another story!

Returning to sanity ...
So, that brings me to the here and now - older, certainly, wiser - well I'd like to think so!  Currently I work for one of the world's largest engineering design and consultancy companies as a bid co-ordinator/manager - long hours, very stressful, none of the hours of writing involves writing about interesting topics like recipes, cook book reviews, great ingredients, fabulous restaurants and the like.  In fact my job doesn't involve food at all except for all the late night and weekend working to meet deadlines which are helped along with regular food deliveries to the office to sustain the troops!  So, for now, my food obsession has no outlet - until now when I can bore other people to death with it via my blog - perfect!!

The Blog...
That leads me on to what I hope this Blog will be - a place to write my thoughts, save links to things that interest me and maybe you too.  I intend to publish some great recipes I have come across, collected, adapted but as I mentioned previously, I rarely follow a recipe to the letter, except where exact measurements are critical.  I use my huge library of cook books as a source of inspiration and I frequently substitute in other ingredients, don't measure things and use the "taste, taste, taste again" method to check how the recipe is progressing which means that passing on my own take of a recipe is nigh on impossible.  My best friend from the past 25 years who has seen my cooking evolve and has been guinea pig more times that she probably cares to remember, can vouch what I say about my recipes.  She and her husband often over the years have asked me for my recipe for whatever it was I made for that dinner and I am almost never able to give them the exact recipe.  I can tell you what ingredients I have used and maybe a guesstimate as to quantities but this doesn't really help you recreate what I have made.  Hence my idea is to re-produce the great tried and tested recipes on which I have based my dish or which have inspired the dish I make.  Hope that makes sense and I'll review as time goes by whether this works or not!

I hope to blog regularly but my job can have periods of time when I don't have time for anything else so please bear with me whilst I learn all about what makes a good blog, this is my first attempt and beginners should be allowed lots of leeway ;-D

All the best - great food, great friends, great times to you all

Phoodie