I am Rebecca; professionally trained chef and lover of food. I fell in love with cooking at about eight years old after I started baking with a friend and her mother on playdates. I brought this love home with me and before long my mum and I started baking together. When we baked, we made wonderfully English offerings such as scones and fruit cakes, interspersed with the occasional crisp, light coconut macaroon from Maguerite Patten’s Book of Cakes and Baking. These are some of the fondest memories of my childhood.
I think I was about nine when mum bought me my first cookbook and allowed me to bake by myself. It was the most wonderful gift (not just the book, but the freedom to bake when I wanted). Most days, after school, I would head straight to my cookbook and start creating something. I don’t think I have ever thanked my mum for letting me do this, the mess I created must have driven her mad (and I really wasn’t great at the post kitchen apocalypse clean up).
Fast forward thirty something years and I have spent my life cooking (professionally for a short while, but always as a hobby outside of work). Straight out of school I trained and worked as an accountant for a few years, switched things up and went to culinary school, worked in professional kitchens for a year, fell in love, got married, fell pregnant, suffered from such horrific morning sickness that I went back to accounting to pay the bills, carried on accounting, added a few more job titles to my CV, more accounting, climbed the ladder etc etc and then STOP!
So there I was. It was 2020 and there was a pandemic spreading around the world. I spent the entire March lockdown running someone else’s office from my home, working myself into a frenzy while everyone else was furloughed. My daily routine consisted of work, telling my children “not now, in a minute”, more work, shouting at the children “be quiet, mummy’s working” and then home schooling, followed by “I don’t understand why the bloody teachers changed maths! This isn’t what I learned at school!”
Throughout lockdown the supermarkets ran out of toilet roll, fresh produce, flour, baker’s yeast. At home we grew veg (and lots of it) – something we had always worked towards and taken great satisfaction from. After months of working from home, without thanks, I had a heated conversation with my boss, one of many where he had expressed his anger towards the office being closed. He displayed his typical disregard for government regulations and staff welfare and it was at this point I thought to myself “why am I doing this?” Fifteen minutes later I was on the phone to my husband to see if I could quit my job. Full credit to my awesome husband (his words), he suggested I take some time off from work altogether and think about what was important.
So what is important? To me it’s family. Family first, then cooking, growing my own food and, of course, the time to enjoy these things. Yes, money is now tight, but who needs stuff, right? So from now on (or for as long as our savings allow) I am going to share my love of food with the world.
#thegoodlife #lovecooking #familyfood #growyourown #plantbasedchef #omnifamilymeals #cookingtips #howtocook #thebestrecipes #zerotohero
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