GastroGeekiness

I have a love/hate relationship with my kitchen. I love nothing more than spending the day pretending I'm a domestic goddess the likes of which would put Nigella to shame but I have a confession to make... I am a terribly messy cook. Far from having a gleaming kitchen at the end of an intense cooking session it more resembles the aftermath of world war three. I have been able to tame my Delia like tendencies of using every single bowl I own, but tidiness seems to have eluded me. I know, I am ashamed. I feel like a fraud! Try as I might I have yet to crack the ability to be a tidy cook and if I were ever to win the lottery I would employ a tidier to follow me around as I cooked so as to achieve a gleaming kitchen come the end of my cooking. Until then I will have to  be content with being messy and untidy. Though, I have noticed taking pictures of my food as I'm cooking for upcoming blogs forces me to be a little tidier... Ha! Maybe this is the key? If you have any...

In my garden I am lucky enough to have an abundance of rhubarb. So after picking some stalks, rather than make your bog standard rhubarb crumble (not that there is anything wrong with that), I thought I'd change it up and add some delicious loquats. A few years ago I'd never heard of loquats until my local green grocers suddenly produced them. My cousin who had grown up in Zimbabwe became very excited when she saw them and bought a bag full. When handed one to eat I was presented with a small fruit that slightly resembled an apricot. It has soft flesh and a very slight fur on the skin. When you bite into it you find 5 or so glistening dark brown stones reminiscent of a lychee stone. with each surrounded in a papery membrane. I cannot accurately describe its flavour as it is totally unique. It is soft like a ripe peach or nectarine but can range from syrup sweet to teeth achingly sour. If anyone has ever tasted a sharron fruit/perssimon  you will know how unique its...

In writing all my ideas down in a list for future blogs and recipe ideas I have discovered a problem that I had not occurred to me before; How do I wright down the weights and measurements for my recipes? My Mother and my Grandma taught my how to cook from a very young age. One of my earliest memories with my Grandma is standing on the wooden step in her kitchen watching her make her incredible rhubarb and ginger jam whilst I also stuck the labels onto the awaiting jars. With my mother it has to be using her old brass scales and iron weights to weigh out the butter, sugar and flour for the sponge butterfly cakes we were going to make. In both these instances they and I would ALWAYS weigh in pounds and ounces (or old money as we call it) and to me it made perfect sense. However, when I started to take an interest in cookery books and learnt about weights and measures at school I was learning the metric system (new money) and using grams which, as that was how scho...

I may have only written one blog but I've already got so many ideas for blogs buzzing around in my mind so I thought I'd start now.  I'd like to tell you about a really important part of my life. It's not the typical thing you're probably thinking but to me it is very significant. This thing is Gastroclub .  I stumbled across Gastroclub about 18 months ago via a person I follow on twitter. I observed a ream of spectacular pictures he posted of magnificent food; including squirrel parcels, a gargantuan 13 bird spit roast and a trifle served in a martini glass (I've never had trifle that fancy) and decide I just had to find out what event he was at. After pestering (with a fair amount of badgering too) he gave up his secret and revealed that he was at the new even called gastroclub. It turned out that it was the first event of its kind and more were to be planned, this lit a spark of excitement that has not yet diminished ...

Well this is first blog post for GastoGeekiness and I suppose the first post is always the one where we get all the introducing bit done so you get to know me a little and what exactly this blog is going to be about. So, here we go; First, I don't profess to be any sort of great wordsmith and I will be the first to say my spelling is something to be desired (so please excuse any errors you see) but this blog, I hope, will show a sense of passion... of that I have in droves. For this blog will be dedicated to my love of food, cooking, baking, ingredients, Gastroclub and occasionally my internal ramblings that can wander into strange, random but hopefully fun places. So, the excuses for typos have been written and a brief explanation of the blogs purpose has too. Now about me... My name is Stephanie, you can call me Steph or anything else you wish, as long as it isn't too vicious. When people used to ask me 'what I did' I usually replied that my occupation...