Why am I doing this?
- Mar 20
- 8 min read
"These diminutive pleasures are there if we care to look for them, little joys illuminating an increasingly darkening world. They feed the soul and nourish the spirit. Or at least they do mine." Nigel Slater
Every now and then, I go through a phase of wondering why I keep writing this blog, particularly at the times when I am somewhat uninspired - like now, and so I was interested to read an article highlighted by Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman, in The New Yorker. The writer was Hannah Goldfield and she was trying answer the question Why we can't stop reading - and writing - kitchen diaries. She wasn't really talking about blogs - well a little bit - more about columns and books, and the famous ones like Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries - which actually inspired me to start this blog - and Julie and Julia in which Julie Powell recorded her attempt at working her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. As the other Jamie (Tracey) a Canadian home cook is now doing - this time on video. His motivation was to teach himself to cook, so it's reassuring to see someone making mistakes, but nevertheless ending up with delicious things. Well not always - but mostly.
As I was looking for pictures to illustrate this post I came across a whole area that I had not thought about, although I should have because, Nigel's works, of course, all begin as written notes - in amazingly elaborate handwriting. There's a whole world out there of people sharing these works of art, and a whole world of suppliers supplying them with the materials with which to do it, classes to show them how, and advice on how to get them published.
I have actually made a couple of starts at this kind of thing. Here is the first recipe in one of them - I was going to cook my way through Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World - I think I did about three - dishes. It's not a medium at which I excel. I absolutely cannot draw, and I'm not very good at collage either. And so as I went on it became just words - not very good ones - on a page, and, as you will have recognised by now, I love pictures. Words were just boring. Which I think is why I gave up.
When we were travelling in France and Italy I did try very hard to keep a daily journal and I have three or four to prove it, but pretty soon there were more and more friendly web based tools to share those journeys and those thoughts. So much so that ultimately, having discovered Wix when I set up the website for the film society to which I belonged, I decided to go digital. It began with a holiday journal - sort of postcards home - and eventually, having retired and with nothing much to do except cook dinner, I decided to set up a blog. Which perhaps is my own thing. Almost always related to food in some large or small way,
Today the food blogosphere, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook et al. are full of people documenting their lives as related to food, be it restaurant reviews, recipes, travel/food journals, health advice and so on. Many have made lucrative careers out of this, many have not. I'm sure there are many others like me who just do it for all manner of personal reasons, plugging away in their tiny corner of the internet with not much thought or worry - with no ads - of how many people are reading them. Although of course it is nice to see that at least a few people are. I know there are technical ways to reach a wider audience, and every now and then I get emails from people offering to do the work of achieving that - for a fee of course. But I really am not interested. This is not a full-time thing for me - although it probably takes up two or three hours of my day plus thinking about it as I go about my day. It's something that keeps the brain ticking over in a marginally creative way. It's a hobby. My sister gardens. I cook.
I do worry however, that it is completely self-indulgent. Why would anyone want to know what I think about some new foodie trend, what I saw on my walk today, what's for dinner? Well Hannah Goldfield - The New Yorker writer explains:
"At the dawn of Twitter and Instagram, when the internet was newly awash in photos of avocado toast and latte art, the Luddite rejoinder was “No one cares what you had for breakfast.” Nearly two decades later, this has been roundly disproved. ... We spend our lives in a cycle of having eaten and then needing to do it again; how we feed ourselves reflects our relationship to money, time, pleasure, place. If the food diary pushes ts practitioners toward solipsism, or toward showing off, its popularity also evinces something encouraging: a curiosity about how other people live, the texture of their days." Hannah Goldfield/The New Yorker
Also what to cook for dinner I think. But then she was mostly talking about a column in a New York paper called The Grub Street Diet - which interviewed various celebrities about the food that they ate on a daily basis. People are interested in the 'real' lives of the rich and famous - I have no idea why, but we probably all are to a lesser or greater degree. Are we interested in ordinary people though? Well it seems that the internet and social media tell us that we are. Some of those well read blogs are from very ordinary people and some are not very interesting at all. Some simply post a recipe and that's it. Some add something about the recipe itself, some relate it to their own lives, and I guess the success or otherwise of that depends on the quality of the writing and/or the way it is presented. I do wonder today whether some of the most successful - which now have ads in your face every few lines, might lose their audience, as the screen jolts and refreshes, and the ads take up more space than the content.
I guess we all have our own interests, and at least a few things that we are good at - or at least competent at. For me that's cooking I suppose. I enjoy the planning, the shopping, the execution. Mostly I am reasonably satisfied with what I produce - every now and then I am really pleased, particularly if it's something I dreamt up myself. although it's much more likely to be something I discovered in a book, a magazine or online.
So here I am having another go at my life in food. I set out to do it on a daily basis, but of course, life gets in the way, and it has slipped to an 'almost' daily basis. Even Nigel didn't manage every day in his kitchen diaries.
I only have volume three of these - I must find the others - but in the spirit of offering an example I checked today's date - well what would be the autumnal equivalent - September 20 in which he writes about Thai duck curry - well that's what it's called on the internet Guardian column. In the book it's a Thai-inspired duck curry soup. Being Nigel Slater, and this being a cookbook - not your regular cookbook I suppose, but nevertheless a cookbook, because every entry ends with a recipe, and there are some extra ones too - but being NIgel - there is a lenghty introduction - well lengthy even for him - a mini essay really - about how he had been filming a TV series in a Thai food shop where he bought some Thai red curry paste, which inspired this recipe. A story about curry pastes, his day and how he cooked this dish, ending with:
"the point in the day when food is no longer something on the page or the screen, but becomes something on a plate."
In the introduction to his latest book A Thousand Feasts - not a cookbook, but a collection of writings, longish and also very short he tells us that:
"The thread that binds them is their spirit, a need to keep a written record of the good things, memories of meals shared or eaten alone, of journeys and places, events and happenings, small things have given pleasure before they disappeared. Each one is, I suppose a short story to remind me of something, ordinary or extraordinary that I thought worth chronicling."
And so in those introductions to his recipes everywhere we get stories, mostly inconsequential in many ways but simultaneously thought provoking, soothing, inspiring even.
And so in that spirit I offer you first, this photograph - which I took today - or was it yesterday?, on my walk through our neighbourhood. There on the fencepost was this heron - a common enough bird, around here. The house on whose fence he is perched is bordered by a tiny creek, lined with willows and lillies - both weeds, but both beautiful. The heron is not a weed, but it is common - and yet so elegant, so statuesque. Startling enough that I stopped to take a photograph, impressed that it should still be there by the time I had retrieved my phone/camera from my back pocket. It remained still enough for me to take two in fact. This is, I think the better one. Ordinary, but almost magical.
Nigel admits in his Introduction to A Thousand Feasts that he only records the good things.
"It must be said that I record only the best bits of this life. Moments of gold that can last an entire evening or be over in a flash. I see no point in putting pen to paper to preserve anthing negative, sad or painful. Heaven knows there is enough of that. I have no wish to live in a rose-tinted bubble, but if I have learned one thing, it is not only to concentrate on the'positive stuff', but to cherish it. I will admit to seeking it out, to looking up instead of down, to being curious and to hold on, as tightly as I can, to 'the good things', however small."
Secondly, in the spirit of NIgel - food. It's almost time to go and make the dinner, which today will be some kind of quiche. Something like this - probably mishapen and not all that beautiful, but reliably tasty. I have not yet quite decided on the filling - maybe courgettes, bacon - tarragon perhaps because I have some. Or mushrooms instead of the courgettes, some spinach? It's Friday - quiche and a glass of wine night. Something to cheer me up - I'm reasonably confident when making quiche, and a glass of wine at the end of the day is always a delight. A little reward.
Tomorrow will be all about planning the food for my son's birthday party on Sunday. Already underway.
"Good food should be something we take in our stride, a life-enriching punctuation to our day, rather than something to be fetishised." Nigel Slater
I'll try Nigel, I'll try.
YEARS GONE BY
March 20
2024 - Crudités extremes
2023 - Nothing
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2017 - Vegetarian extremes - idlees
Celebrating the "good stuff" in life, be it the delicious quiche we had last night or the beutiful heron posing for you on its post - that is what life is all about. 🥰