JAS_OH1
Forum GOD!
I knew we were sisters.So when I was about 11years old she enrolled on a French Cookery evening class. She produced some amazing stuff in comparison to the general meat and two (overcooked) veg stuff that was standard fare at the time, but none of it for her family.
Only for showing off at dinner parties.
Being older and allowed to stay up a bit later I sometimes got little bit of a taste or some leftovers and that was the lightbulb moment for me that a bit of effort could produce stuff that tastes amazing.
So I used to go into the cupboard under the stairs where it was quiet and pour over her cookery books drooling at the pictures trying to read weird french words for techniques or ingredients that I had no clue what they were.
It’s around then that I got into cooking.
So I suppose I started with traditional English fare with some slightly more complicated French cookery thrown in. I seem to remember a lot of it was about different sauces and reductions and that fitted in with English food pretty well.
I became obsessed with perfecting techniques for getting the absolute best results. I loved people like Gary Rhodes and anyone who went the extra mile to elevate a dish. The harder it was to do the more I wanted to do it.
That went on for many, many years until what felt like quite a sudden explosion of new ingredients started to become available in our local supermarkets and the whole of the UK (from my POV) or perhaps just my peers embraced ‘foreign foods’ from all over the world. It wasn’t just for London folk or people who lived near big ports anymore!
That led me into Asian cookery which is an area I absolutely adore, an enormous range of tastes and textures that really floats my boat and probably always will.
I also loved looking at the dishes of countries I’d been to or a cuisine that belonged to a nation I’d seen on the television.
Now I simply only want to cook it all and flit about like a person with a very specific form of ADHD that only applies to food!
My mother did go all out for dinner parties and for holidays, but she had six children to feed and stuck to a budget, so we ate a lot of tuna casserole growing up--to the point where my oldest brother will not touch the stuff and the mere mention of it makes him cringe. I started cooking around the age of 12, but it was pretty simple fare for the most part. I grew up in a coastal community on the panhandle of Florida in the city of Destin, which for many years was nicknamed "the luckiest fishing village of the world", so I went fishing with my dad a lot and learned to clean and cook what I caught. My dad was from SE Texas near the Louisiana border and most of his experience cooking fish was either frying it or making gumbo. But in my 20s I had a couple of boyfriends who were chefs in local restaurants so I learned a lot from them, especially in ways to prepare seafood.
In my 30's I met my husband and moved to Ohio. He is of Italian descent so I learned a lot from his family about how to cook Italian dishes. I also would eat at restaurants and if I found something on the menu I loved, I would try my best to recreate it.
I am still a work in progress!
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