Food is an important part of a balanced blog

So, I've started a blog. I felt I needed a creative outlet of some kind and starting a blog seems a very 21st century way of achieving that.

But what to write about? I'm not really an expert on much. And the world is depressing enough without more Newcastle United based blogging. What else do I like? I'm passionate about the area of London in which I live, but I already follow some excellent blogs on Shepherds Bush (links to these in due course) and don't have much to add. I'm not witty or good enough with words to write creatively like some other blogs I follow (links to these cerebral masterpieces will also be added once I'm more familiar with this medium). I like history but don't know enough to write about it. I enjoy travelling and visiting places but I do not get away enough to fill a whole blog....

But a few years ago I decided I wanted to become at least competent at cooking. I had, without realising it, been spoiled by my Mother's excellent cooking whilst growing up (it's only relatively recently I've realised not everyone enjoyed a made from scratch meal every night- Thanks Mum).  I could see how much my Mum enjoyed cooking and thought I'd like to be able to cook delicious food for people the way she could.

This was a long term project to say the least (and is still very much a work in progress) but cooking is now something I enjoy and find to be a real stress reliever. Spending an afternoon (or evening, to the annoyance of the long suffering girlfriend- "WHERE'S MY DINNER!") playing with ingredients and recipes is one of my favourite ways to pass the time.  I also have several friends and work colleagues with a keen interest in food and chatting with and learning from them as been great. So food seems a sensible launchpad for my foray into the exciting world of blogging.

A quick google search shows that there's hundreds, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of food blogs out there. So how can mine be different? Well, I'm going to use food as a loose theme and see where we go. I'm hoping it will be easy enough to tie in the few travels I go on, the shops in the Bush I go to, a bit of history, any photos I take (photography is perhaps the next hobby) and you'll just have to put up with the odd football related post...

So will I manage more than a couple of posts? Will this fizzle out after a few weeks? I hope not. Let's see.

Now to try and figure out how all this blogging malarkey works. And change the font and background to green and purple, just like a teenager's myspace page back in 2004....

Photo: So Claire and I sometimes call food "pie". It seems apt that the first photo should be an actual pie....