About Me

I often said to my mother that I’d marry a chef. I’d been at boarding school for 5 years and had little opportunity to cook. At school, I quickly decided that the home cooking class was a waste of time, since it focussed solely on cooking and icing a wedding cake. I did typing instead, topped the class and won a prize – a book on icing cakes – was someone trying to tell me something?

I didn’t marry a chef – I came close to it! Learnt a lot from watching the chef boyfriend and working in various restaurants.

The older English style of cooking has something to answer for. My memories of cooked vegetables aren’t good. It was a challenge for us to eat them. Show me a brussel sprout and I’ll start turning white – even today! My French friend is convinced that we simply haven’t learnt how to cook vegetables – she loved the way her mum cooked brussel sprouts.

It’s taken some time for us to start experimenting with different flavours, styles of cooking and ingredients. I hadn’t heard of basil until I went to the big smoke (city) and it was years before I came across saffron.

I wasn’t a complete stranger to exotic food, being brought in Papua New Guinea, with many Chinese stores where we could buy dried mango, salty plums and a dried type of ginger which were our ‘lollies’.

It wasn’t until my late twenties that I started cooking, and then it took a while to find ‘my style’. I’m a home cook and I’ve been cooking for family and friends using ‘my style’. Friends would probably summarise ‘my style’ as lovely, flavoursome and fresh. What my teenager would it call – well like, it really, like, depends on the day!

I use recipes for ideas and modify them. Mostly I don’t use a recipe – I look at what’s in the fridge and cupboard, and go from there. The idea for this website is to provide a few recipes for each category and then provide more recipes in the newsletter (ezine) - you're very welcome to sign up for this.

Feel free to use the comment form, I’ve probably missed something, or got something wrong or right. Let me know what you’d like to see.

Many of us find less and less time for cooking, which means we are more and more tempted by fast food, prepared meals and snack foods. But consider if we don’t look after our health – at some point we may not be able to work or look after our family very well. So we really need to look after ourselves. This is one motivation for this website.

Not only should we look after our health, but we should ENJOY looking after our health. So, can cooking really be fun? For me, cooking is relaxing and fun. Sometimes if I’m cooking for many, I get stressed, but in a great, energetic kind of way – I worry if there’s enough food, will people like it, did I cater for everyone’s needs??? There are other times when I feel cooking is a drag – this seems to happen after work. To overcome this feeling, I think of the health benefits, and that anyway 15-30 minutes isn’t a long time out of my life. We can also see it as a labor of love (read Like Water for Chocolate - if you haven’t already) and a way to give to others.

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If you're passionate about what you do or about an interest you have, then like me, you could start up your own business. I have created this website from a template, lots of work, and great tools as a step towards working completely for myself. I came across SBI and found out just how many others were doing it, and doing it well. I needed to have proof about what was possible and here it is. There's a lot out there on offer, so its worthwhile comparing SBI with others. If you have questions, someone at SBI can answer your questions. If you can write, have lots of information in your head that could be useful to others, and you really want to be your own boss, then you really should check it out.