I was 'today years old' when I decided I liked cooking.

During lockdown I created a vegetable garden and built a chook house and put four chooks in it.

"Now what?!" I thought.

I hate cooking, what am I going to do with all these eggs... and TURNIPS? What possessed me to buy turnips to grow? Who eats them?

Well, chooks do. So that's good.

I hate cooking. I hate cleaning up. I have always had an aversion to touching food scraps. There! I said it! I've admitted it on the internet. I barely acknowledged this strange phobia to myself. Food scraps and washing up dish water... *shudder*. I'm sure there is a support group out there for me. (Ok... this is me. and Brumotactillophobia: fear of food touching is also a thing - just so you know.)

I have really enjoyed putting in gardens and looking after the chooks. I have no concern about chook shit or dirt. Just... unused food. *shudder*.

I hate my cooking. It never tastes as good as other people's cooking. Restaurants are run by people who are experts at cooking and I always prefer to pay a specialist that DIY. I wouldn't dream of fixing the plumbing in the house, or re-wiring the fridge. So I ate out, and occasionally made spaghetti.

In fact during my "low days" I lived on cooked pasta with butter and salt and pepper. Now I have fatty liver disease. So don't do that.

I spent most of my adult life (and for that matter youth) on welfare, so I never had the money to buy all the fancy ingredients. I remember in 1988 we had been existing on macaroni and potatoes for so long, that when we finished the big sack of potatoes and bought a new sack, I was blown away with the flavour of the new potatoes. My flat mate said, "We've been eating really old potatoes, Vic. This is really sad, being excited about a potato that tastes like a potato".

I did develop some key recipes that I frequented for a while, but my fear of fat limited things a lot. In the 80s and 90s I would remove fat and oil from my diet completely to lose weight, as it was the fashion at the time. It never worked. Now I'm 53 and I'm being told it's the hidden sugar in everything that is making fat. Great! Now you tell me. Lost 20kg earlier this last year after the fatty liver diagnosis just by removing sugar. What a sad time that was.

Now I'm just trying to get excited about cooking food.

My stove exploded and I needed a new one and while I was waiting for the new one I bought a Pressure Cooker! Oh my life has changed. I discovered that Kale and Pumpkin make an amazing soup! Even my neighbours loved it. (See, still can't handle the left overs of really nice things I make).
This week I achieved greatness with an orange cake filled with seeds and nuts, and a cottage pie made with left over pumpkin soup for stock. So I decided to create a little home recipe book for myself to encourage me to cook these things again.

Then I thought who has time for that?! I'll blog it!