2017: the year of growing up, through food (hopefully)

Welcome.

This isn’t technically the first post of my ~New Blog~, but having built up a cushion of things to edit, I’ve finally got a grip on what I want to say, which is kind of big. So here goes. I’m saying it.

2016, as the popular media would have us know, was terrible. A year of unexpected right-wing triumphs, hatred, war, terrorism, and of course, the most tragic of all, celebrity death. The smaller tragic events re-enforced the big, and it became a fairly common narrative that the year was Not A Good One, in the news.

In our personal lives, of course, it was just another year. For me, a now 27-year-old Londoner, the combination of the two has resulted in an interesting feeling coming out of the year. The feeling is this: I am no longer ‘young’. And I don’t mean that I am instead old. I’m not. But just that being young is no longer part of who I am. I’m no longer the youngest person in a work-team, I don’t have people asking me what I’m ‘going’ to do, just what I am doing, and most of all, I don’t have a bloody Young Person’s Railcard anymore.

This isn’t a sad thing, at all. I probably really didn’t really suit being young. I’m too cautious and throw up when I drink too much. But, what made me realise my non-youth status is that I looked back and realised that I spent most of 2016 doing fairly pedestrian things. I moved into a flat with just my boyfriend, I stayed in more than I went out, I worried about the news. And I cooked.

Which is what leads me to The Blog. As a ‘young person’, I worried I needed to get a blog. I work in media, somewhere where your own personal brand is key. And somehow I’ve muddled along, getting through countless internships, four real job titles and two redundancies in the time I’ve been working without one. So I clearly don’t need one.

But in the past couple of years I’ve started to want one. I want to write about what I’m eating. I love eating. I love cooking. I love going to restaurants. I love talking to people about what they’re eating, what they like and dislike. I spend most of my time doing one of the three.

And I have a lot of people in my life to cook for and eat with, but it’s still not enough. I want the internet to join in. I want to make sense of what I’ve been learning. So marrying up my being more of a grown up and these learnings makes sense, I think.

Plus there’s so much more I need to learn. I think I am a good cook, and that I have good taste, but I read restaurant reviews that know how meats have been jointed, I read recipes that remark in an aside about keeping leftovers for stock. I’ve started to know about these things — I make a damn fine leftover, as the title of this site suggests — but not really, not in a grown up way.

So, just over 500 words later, here I am. Growing up, learning to cook, learning how to order and criticise in restaurants. On the internet.

[Photo via Pexels]