Hello and welcome to Kitchen Notes.
I’m Tom – a father, food writer, recipe developer and freelance PR consultant living in the North East of England.
I grew up in 1980s North Yorkshire – raised among a family of food lovers and experimental cooks. My maternal grandmother was something of a culinary magpie – squirrelling away recipes from family and friends in a little red A-Z notebook. Over the years, she wrote down the instructions for the meals that punctuated her life – from childhood favourites, reliable dinner party staples, and even the details of my parent’s wedding cake. In the margins, she would scribble down comments such as “very good!” or how much all the ingredients had cost to buy when she first made it. As the present-day custodian of this book, it remains in regular use in my own kitchen and is among my most treasured possessions.
We all need food to survive, but for me it goes beyond that. Providing a meal for family and friends is one of the ways I show people that I care. Gathering around the dinner table – free from the distractions of modern life – you can laugh, joke and talk. Through good times and bad, food can comfort, uplift, invigorate and console; creating lifelong memories which are later evoked by smells and taste.
This website is my 21st Century version of my grandmother’s A-Z recipe book; a record of the food I feed my own family and friends. I hope you will enjoy trying these recipes and that they will become firm favourites in your own home. I love to hear how people have adapted and changed things in their own kitchens so please feel free to leave notes and comments throughout this site.
