So, this is the first post on my new “blog”, I have blogged before, but never managed to keep it going for very long before other things took over my time, and it just became a bit abandoned. This time, I’m determined that it is going to be different, and that this is a longer term project.

I found it very difficult to think of an appropriate title for this article. I ran through a huge number of cliches, including such gems as ‘new life resolution’, dismissed them for obvious reasons, and ended up with the above.

This is a blog about food, buying it, cooking it, eating it, and most of all loving it.

More personally than that, it’s a blog about my decision to change my life, about coming to the realisation that what you do isn’t what you care about, and about turning a dream into reality.

A brief introduction would probably be a good idea.

I’m John, I was born about 30 years ago in the south of England, and have since then lived and worked in 7 different countries, doing various different things. My day job is nothing to do with food, but it does pay the bills, and until now I still didn’t really know what I wanted to be.

Over the course of the last year and a bit I’ve been spending a lot of my time feeling sorry for myself and down because I hadn’t realised what the two things (as opposed to people) that I could become passionate about were until a long time after colleges, universities and career paths had to be thought about and decided upon. Having finally realised what they were, it was depressing to think that there was very little that I could do about it, that my life was now set in a mould, and that I would spend the next 30 years going to an office everyday and doing something that really doesn’t mean all that much to me at all.

The time has come to do something about that, to make at least one of the things that I care about the thing that I spend the biggest part of my life doing. That is where the food comes in.

Food is of huge importance to me, food has the power to make me obscenely happy. Not only eating fantastic food, but also preparing it, watching peoples faces when they put something that tastes fantastic in their mouths.

So, here begins a journey. It’s a journey that will take a few years, that will take most of my free time, a lot of effort, and virtually all of our disposable income, but one that I feel I have to take. I’m going to make my way along a hugely steep path between enthusiastic and reasonably skilled home cook to owner and head chef of a restaurant which creates food that is better than sex, the kind of food that makes you grin, makes you inexplicably happy, and makes you eat far more than you should .

In the immediate future, this involves a number of things. It means being highly successful and therefore well paid at what I currently do, it means a lot of time developing my culinary skills and learning how to manage a restaurant, it even means a haircut.

It’s a huge challenge, but it is what I feel that I have to do. If you want to read about all of my adventures in food along the way, then just stay tuned to this blog.