Setting the Table
Photo: Katie Currid, 2021
the making of a domestic demigoddess
There are countless reasons I’m attracted to Nigella’s approach to eating, but the big one is the obvious pleasure she takes in shopping, cooking, and consuming. Grocery shopping is my favorite errand, and I believe very strongly that every meal should be delicious and special, even if it’s simple.
I have an About page that gives you a general overview of the why of this project, but I wanted to lay out a few things.
I have no formal training. I worked in food and bev for many years, and my master’s thesis is about foodways, but I didn’t go to culinary school. I’m an enthusiastic home cook (though a guy who worked at fancy restaurants taught me how to shuck an oyster and poach an egg). I have no photography training, which will be evident. I’m hoping to improve them as I go here. Please be nice to me.
I’m cooking on an electric stovetop in a rental house. I have decent tools, but nothing fancy. I’m taking photos on my iPhone and writing all this on an ancient Lenovo.
I’m using mostly metric measurements. I just prefer it for baking, and the Domestic Goddess does a lot of baking. I’m a big advocate for weighing your ingredients, both for precision and for making cleanup easier. I’ll probably list both Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures. I’m not messing around with gas markers because I have never really grasped what those are and also I don’t have gas and am pretty salty about it.
I’m going to tell a lot of little stories, just like Nigella. I love reading the header on recipes. I love the little stories, I love hearing about the iterative process of making a dish perfect. Food is culture and culture is important. This blog is about me starting my life over and cooking again. Of course there will be stories. I’m going to talk about some pretty personal stuff, so feel free to skip straight to the recipes if that’s what you want to do, but I am very, very funny and it’s your loss.
I’ll keep it fun and easy. I adore stunt cooking, aka, making something intensely difficult and time consuming just to show off. That said, my interest in writing a blog about aspirational cooking is low. I live in a medium-size city and don’t have access to ingredients bigger markets have. I’m chatty by nature and I take a pretty relaxed approach to recipe adaptation. We will be eating a lot of midnight snacks.