New Addition: Recipes

To introduce the latest addition to the blog, the recipe collection, I want to talk about my history with food; what shaped my eating habits, my interest in nutrition and my love of fresh ingredients.

I was raised on the breadline. My Mam was single, received no financial support from my Dad and worked low-paying jobs. She didn't know how to cook and she didn't have the time to learn even if she had wanted to. Typical meals were tinned stuff on toast; cheese and hot dog omelettes; frozen things with frozen chips and a rotation of beans, peas and tinned sweetcorn. Remember Findus Crispy Pancakes? I thought they were the only pancakes to exist.

When I was about five years old, my uncle made a comment about a woman on TV. He said: 'she's got tits as flat as pancakes'. I did not understand. Pancakes aren't flat? This rolled around my pedantic little brain for over a year. When I was six, we moved from Elswick, Newcastle to a small, almost rural town called Crawcrook. I made friends with the kid next door and her Mam invited me round on Shrove Tuesday. She served up pancakes with lemon and sugar, and finally, I saw the flat pancakes. That woman gave me peace of mind along with a lovely plate of food.

We did have Sunday dinner most weeks, but that would be a sad chicken that had been shown no love, boiled-to-death veg, frozen roasties and frozen Yorkshires. I was about 18 when I first tried a homemade roast potato - I couldn't believe how delicious. Of course, a Northern diet wouldn't be complete without a Full English Breakfast for tea. This was always served with a cup of tea. I didn't really like tea, but I liked that this meal was paired with something. It almost felt celebratory.

The omelettes would make me sick, as would the cereal or porridge I was made to eat in the mornings. I hated milk, but 'it was good for me,' so I wasn't allowed to go without it. At breakfast, I would painstakingly press each spoonful of cereal against the bowl to squeeze out as much milk as possible. I was often sick at school, shortly after arriving. It turns out that I have an intolerance to egg yolk and dairy. Food intolerances aren't very working class, so it was (and still is) ignored. To this day, my Mam will say, 'you were such a sickly kid,' as if the reason why is a mystery.

Now, I've painted a rather bleak picture here. That's not to say it isn't accurate, but there was one pocket of comfort in all of this. My Mam's boyfriend's homemade vegetable soup. She learned how to cook it from him, and she made it now and again when it was really cold. It was thick with red lentils and had big chunks of root vegetables, cooked so low and slow that they melted in your mouth like butter. She always bought Greggs stottie to go with that, regular sliced bread wouldn't do it justice. I've never tasted that soup with any other type of bread and yet I know stottie bread is its only match.

When I was 13, I got my first job, at the chippy where my Mum worked. I did three hours on a Saturday and was paid £10 for it. This money afforded me a bit of freedom with food. One Sunday, we went to the pub round the corner that had a carvery. Eating out was very rare for us, but I was sick of Sunday Dinner foods, and that carvery wasn't even nice. I asked my Mum if I could go home, insisting I wasn't hungry. She looked hurt but let me go. I marched straight up the hill to the Co-Op, with the tenner burning a hole in my pocket. I was picking out salad ingredients when I spotted a little snack bag of walnuts. I'd never tried them before, apart from the tiny chopped pieces you get on carrot cake. I threw them into the basket, then into the salad I made at home. It felt so good to have the kitchen to myself, to experiment, to have autonomy over what I was eating and to eat produce that actually had some water content. I think my body had been thirsty all its life.

When I had my first child at 21, I was determined to introduce her to all the foods, all the flavours, and to ensure her diet was nutrient-dense. My cooking skills were extremely inconsistent at that age, as I had no learned skills from childhood but I had successfully followed some complex recipes from books. I could make an aubergine and courgette lasagne from scratch, for example, but I couldn't boil an egg! That's not me using a humorous idiom, I honestly couldn't boil an egg. When I wanted to try Gracie with a dippy egg, I had to get out my laptop and do an internet search to find out how.

While I'm a more practiced cook now, the Recipe Collection is nothing sophisticated. A lot of the recipes I share will just be brief instructions for meals which use fresh ingredients that compliment each other. Forgive me for not always stating how many grams or millilitres something is, I don't often know myself. Just throw stuff in, it will come together in the end! And if it doesn't, it can't be any worse than corned beef mixed into mashed potatoes and topped with lukewarm baked beans.