Somebody asked me recently how many people I’ve fed. Not “cooked for” — fed. I started counting and gave up somewhere in the tens of thousands. Restaurants, nightclubs, catering halls, weddings, wakes, my own kitchen on a Tuesday when nobody asked me to. Decades of it.
And the honest truth is I never fully understood why I did it until I started writing it down.
That’s what this is. A few times a week I’ll put a story here — something that happened over a plate, or because of one. Some of them are funny. A suckling pig that didn’t fit the oven and cost me a job. A Christmas dinner of microwave chilli that I remember better than any feast since. Some of them aren’t funny at all, and I’ll not pretend otherwise.
They’re all true, more or less, give or take the way memory flatters a good story.
I’ve a book coming — Eat My Family, out this summer — and these dispatches are the off-cuts, the warm-ups, and occasionally the bits that were too much for the book. If you like them, the best thing you can do is leave your email below, so the next one finds you instead of the other way round.
So that’s the deal. I cook, things go wrong, I write it down, you read it. Same as it ever was, except now you don’t have to do the dishes.
Pull up a chair.