New Beginnings

Welcome to James on Toast Mark 2.

Having started this blog a couple of years ago, life got busy (New house, wedding, baby) and I stopped writing. All my previous content was created directly in WordPress and unfortunately went down with the ship, so this is a brand new start.

Recently, I attended a wonderful food writing course at All Hallows Farmhouse, run by Karen Barnes, Delicious. Magazine’s editor.  I was looking for some inspiration and guidance on getting the blog back up and running, so if you need someone to blame for the existence of this little corner of the internet, blame Karen!

I will probably write about the course soon (even though writing about a writing course might be a little like a snake eating its own tail) but for now I want to share one of the pieces of writing created during that weekend – It’s not really indicative of the sort of content I will be regularly posting but I am proud of it and it seemed like a good place to start anew. I hope you enjoy it.

Culinary Hopes

My infant son is running riot around the kitchen. He is an accident waiting to happen, a scampering ball of curiosity, untempered  by the fear of consequence. Right now he is an entertainingly cute liability, but as he waves a toy cleaver above his head like a loon and happily clutches part of a plastic kiwi he has ‘cut’ in half, I can’t help but think ahead.  Soon he will be able to join in with cooking for real. Something which, thanks to a mini-kitchen so well appointed I am slightly jealous, he is starting to show an interest in.

I can picture him standing on a chair, stirring cake mix.  Filling tins and scraping bowls and gleefully licking the spatula clean.  I can see him impatiently waiting for the cakes to be cooked, sighing with frustration each time they have to return to the oven for another five minutes.  I can feel his excitement at slicing into the finished cake, still too warm really, but irresistible any longer.

I can imagine teaching a young boy how to flip a pancake and poach an egg and make a roux and 1000 other essential, trivial skills. As the toddler in front of me shoves a plastic chef’s knife into his mouth, I picture myself teaching him how to wield the real thing – him reckless, me nervous, his mother unable to watch.

Clear as day I can see a young man standing at the hob, home to visit, showing his old man how it’s done.  Jokingly issuing orders and lecturing on the virtues of… whatever.

A co-conspirator in kitchen chaos.  A partner in crime.  A kindred spirit.

And perhaps he will be all of these things. Or perhaps he will forge a path entirely of his own. A path paved with ready meals, in search of some other glory.  After all, I was never able to summon up more than polite, lukewarm enthusiasm for my father’s ancient model railway, or obsession with clearing out cupboards.

But as my 18 month old son carefully places a tiny cup underneath his mock espresso machine, waits for the gurgling and frothing sounds to finish, and proudly hands me an entirely imaginary cup of coffee, I can dare to dream.