Saturday, 17 January 2015

Things could start happening here soon again...

To start with - I'm not sure if anyone still will be reading this. Is anyone still subscribing to the RSS feed of this blog or even visiting it now and then in the hope(?) of a new post? I guess I'll find out one way or another.

This turned into quite a bit of a longer break than I originally expected or anticipated. It is getting close to three years since I last posted on here and as you probably can imagine quite a lot have happened in that time. These things will of course be reflected in the content of my posts.


One thing that have not changed is my interest in food and cooking, I've kept that up during my self-imposed blog silence. Lots of food have been cooked and even more have been eaten. I hope that have sharpened both skills and tastebuds, something that hopefully will shine through in future posts here.

The not too dumb reader of this will by now have figured out that my urge and desire, or purely just mojo, to blog have come to the point where I can't resist it any longer. It feels like it is time to resurrect Freestyle Cookery from the underworld of dead blogs.

Some of you might ask what my aims with the blog will be now and the answer is the same as it always was. I want to inspire people to cook food, to get you to try new dishes or ways of cooking food that you possibly wouldn't have unless you had seen it here.

If I can spread the word about cooking your own food from the ground up every now and then and just convert some people to doing this I think I have succeeded with a part of my 'mission'. It doesn't have to take long time or involve much effort to make yourself a meal that is so much better than one of the pre-made convenience alternatives that so many live on.

One thing I'll try my best not to do is to put too much pressure on myself with this blog again. This should be a fun thing for me as well as you that read it. Too much pressure will just make it feel like a burden and I'll drop off again.

What kind of posts can you expect from me on this resurrected blog?

Well, it will be quite a lot like it was - things I used to cook and blog about is still things that I do today. There will be some new stuff as well, since time has moved on and I have dropped some interests and added some new ones. Some of which follows here:

  • Cycling - I've taken up road cycling and do quite a lot of it. When it gets too cold and the roads gets too treacherous I do quite a lot of turbo training in the garage, or the Wattage Cottage as it is known. All this training and riding have made me a bit more conscious as to what I eat. As well as looking at what I eat before a ride - expect some posts and recipes that relates to this.
  • 5:2 - I've been following the 5:2 diet for a bit over two years now and it has worked just fine for me. The reason I went on it was that I ate far too much good food and didn't exercise enough. My cycling was hurting from the extra weight I was carrying around. With the combination of the diet and the cycling I'm now in a much better place healthwise - and I can still eat all the good foods that I like. But don't worry - I'm not a diet prophet. I do my diet and let you do what you want. There will be the occasional recipe that is aimed at working under the 5:2 diet but there won't be any boring 'cardboard and dust' recipes. No Siree!
  • Charcuterie - I built myself a curing chamber out of an old fridge and added some electronic gizmos for maintaining temperature and humidity. This is so I can try my hand at making various types of charcuterie. Ranging from the run-of-the-mill duck breast prosciutto to the more advanced fermented sausages like salami and nduja. Expect posts about this. If there's interest in how I built the Chark Tank I could post some notes on that as well.
  • Sauces - This is a new-ish one. I realise that I'm crap at saucing my dishes. I need to learn the basic sauces and then work on from there. Learning how to make a Hollandaise and then being able to do it again and again is one of the first things on this list. Maybe I should video one of my first attempts - as a guide of how not to do it and at the same time show you how to swear in at least three different languages? Hopefully the recipes will start to include more and better sauces as time goes on.
Well, that's it, for now. Did anyone read this? Is anyone looking forward to me submitting some more stuff here? Is there anyone out there that would be willing to pay me lots of money not to post ever again?

Feedback, of any type, is as always warmly welcome here.

Until the first proper post comes up - Stay classy Didcot!

P.S
As a little teaser - here's two photos that I found in drafts here on Blogger. I have a distant memory of the shrimp dish, but the chicken one I can't even remember having cooked. Maybe I should try and recreate one of them for a proper post?


2 comments:

  1. Mike, glad you're coming back to the blogosphere! I would have ended up feeling pressured too at your blogging pace of 2 or 3 posts a week! Man! I don't know how anyone can keep that up.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you Jean - really appreciated. It's one of my greatest strengths - putting far too much pressure on myself. ;-) I'm now trying to pace myself better. There's a queue of posts but I'm spreading them out so I don't have to cook, shoot and blog something every week if I don't feel like it.

    // Mike

    ReplyDelete

Please leave a comment. Positive or negative - all comments are welcome and useful. I do enjoy hearing what you think of my posts, what is good and what needs improving so please post away.

// Mike