Recipes

Sadly, I am poor documenter of the dishes I make and I sincerely hope this blog will help me catalogue my trials, success or otherwise. It is a great source of frustration to me that I get caught up in the culinary moment and in retrospect often have little clue how to re-create a dish I enjoyed – or sometimes where to find the recipe in my many cookbooks.

Although I use recipes most of the time, I find tweaking them irresistible (except patisserie where I behave myself and do as I am told). Sometimes my recipes amount to no more than a scant web search for an ingredient combination to hang a meal around.

Hand-dived Uist scallops with fennel and charlotte potatoes. I don’t recall the specific contents of the dressing….

I don’t often do tried and tested but have a tendency to be prolific, trying many new recipes each week. I can’t afford the luxury of buying piles of cooking tomes and I would only find it saturating and overwhelming. I often work through numerous recipes from one book at a time, ingredients permitting.

I will use this blog to catalogue and explore the experiences I have with recipes. For those in books or online, this may include changes in ingredients, measurements and cooking times, Admittedly, this only comes with experience in knowing a particular book tends to contain recipes with, for example, too little/much salt/sugar for my palate, or where the quantities are ridiculously large (often the case when you are routinely only trying to cook for 2). I will always cite the recipe I have used and credit the author, as necessary.

I will apologise in advance for the quality of my photographs, all taken on my iPhone. I am a poor photographer, mainly due to a general lack of interest in photography. I can only hope my images improve with time and a bit more effort…