This started out being a post about Eggs Benedict, and now it’s not.

I don’t watch very much television, in fact for most of the last 5 years I’ve lived without one. Currently we are staying with some relatives of mine, who love their TV and who virtually never switch it off. For the majority of the time this just winds me up, sometimes it even makes me want to throw things through the screen as a way to bring an end to the inane bullshit that I’m subjected to. Even if I don’t watch it, I can hear the bloody thing wherever I am in the house. Why people watch utter drivel that doesn’t even really interest them is beyond me, but millions of people seem to, so maybe it’s me who is odd.

Despite the fact that I think the majority of stuff on TV is a pile of crap, there are moments when it inspires me. Most of these moments are to do with food, this evening was the final of masterchef on TV, and watching the kitchens working and the dishes coming out of them in some 3 Michelin starred restaraunts had me close to tears. This is how we should be cooking and eating, this is food as art, this is beautiful. It was seriously beautiful, and I say that without even tasting or smelling the food.

The ingredients, the thought, the skill and most of all the passion being poured into the dishes coming out of these kitchens leaves me in awe. I don’t mean the diluted American sense of the word, I mean real awe: an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like.

If we don’t aspire to that kind of level, if we don’t want to cook and to eat food like that, then who are we to call ourselves foodlovers, or cooks, or ‘foodies’, or ‘gourmets’ or any of the other terms that people love to apply to themselves.

The best food in the world has the power to make us laugh, or cry. The best food in the world can make us aroused. That’s the food that I want to eat, and that is the food that I want to produce. That is what I’m going to do.

Why do we settle for throwing frozen crap down our throats when there are such fantastic ingredients available out there, why do people eat anything that involves a microwave when it is so simple to create real fantastic food without it taking hours or costing a fortune.

I’ve had it with mediocre crap, I’m not eating it anymore. Why should I waste my time?

This is the 4th or 5th day of this blog, and having just looked through what has preceeded this post, I realise just what a load of bollocks it is. It’s not about passion, or how I feel about food. It’s not about me at all, it’s me trying to be clever, trying to show off, googling for the history of a classic dish, then throwing a very simple recipe at the end of it, and thinking that I’m clever and am educating people about food. That’s not what this was supposed to be about, and from here on in, it’s not going to be. The existing posts will probably stay here, if for no other reason than to remind me what I shouldn’t be doing (that isn’t to say that they won’t get a substantial edit though).

From today, what you will find here is not just articles about how to do things, and recipes, but more than that, a diary of my progress towards my dream. It’s a dream that grows more concrete by the day, by now it involves certain chairs, a certain colour of candles, the kernel of a menu, and the realisation of just how far there is to go, and how much of me there it to be thrown into creating the atmosphere and the food that I want to serve in it.