recipes · life
Rediscovering My Love for Cooking
Cooking has always been my reset button.
When everything feels like too much, the kitchen is where I go. There is something about having a task that requires your full attention in a very physical, sensory kind of way that quiets the noise in your head better than almost anything else I have tried. You cannot spiral about the future when you are watching a roux so it does not burn. You just cannot. I have tried. The roux won.
I grew up in Upington in the Northern Cape, in a home where everything was made from scratch. Takeout was a rare occasion, not a Friday night habit, and I genuinely did not know any different. My gran cooked, my mum cooked, the women in my family cooked, and it was simply how things were done. Food was not just sustenance, it was the language everyone spoke. You showed up, you cooked, you fed people, and that is how you showed you cared.
Growing up, our food was simple and deeply good in that way that simple food often is. Salt, pepper, maybe some herbs, a few meat spices here and there. Nothing fiery or complicated. Just good, honest food that tasted like home. Spice was not really part of our world and I did not know what I was missing until my early twenties, when I started easing into it gently, like someone who had heard spice was nice but was not fully committed to the bit yet.
Then I started dating Kaylan.
Kaylan himself is a braai man and a breakfast man, which honestly works out well for everyone in this house, but his family is where I discovered a whole other world of cooking. His mum taught me how to make a great curry and biryani and she still shares her recipes with me, which always feels like a hug from far away. I have not looked back since. The first time I made one on my own I think my eyes watered and I absolutely pretended they did not. But I kept going. And then I kept making it again. That whole flavour world I had never grown up with became one of my favourite parts of our life together.
Then I got pregnant.
I have to be completely honest with you, I basically stopped cooking.
The motivation disappeared, the smells became my enemies, and the energy simply was not there. The only times I really got myself into the kitchen were when I was hit with a craving for something specific and childhood-coded that I could not find in Perth and needed to make myself. Those sessions were the thing that kept me connected to cooking through a year where I had very little else to give. That and the fact that nobody was going to make it for me because, as previously established, Kaylan is a braai man.
Everything changed when Callan turned six months.
He had been on solids since four months and I am proud to say I am raising a little foodie. Watching him discover new flavours and textures is genuinely one of the most entertaining parts of my week. He is curious and enthusiastic and completely unafraid to try things, which I think is the best gift you can give a child when it comes to food. He has also very clearly inherited his parents’ love of fresh bread and butter, which I am choosing to see as a win for everyone involved and not at all a problem for future me. As he gets older I want to introduce him to both of our cultures through food. The koeksisters and the curries and the malva pudding, but also whatever the Australian equivalent of all of that turns out to be. He is an Aussie after all. We are going to have to figure that part out together.
It is funny how becoming someone’s mum can give you back something you did not realise you had quietly set down. I cook with more intention now. More thought, care and actual joy in the process rather than just the end result. I want Callan to grow up the way I did, in a house where the kitchen is always doing something and where food is another way of saying I love and care for you.
That is the part my gran got so right. She used to make what she called vaal kos. Lamb and potatoes, seasoned simply with salt and pepper, with freshly baked bread on the side. That was it. But I have eaten at a lot of tables since then and I have never had anything that felt quite like that did. Nothing about it was complicated or impressive on paper. She just fed you and told you she loved you and you never had to guess. That is the kind of cook I want to be.
That is what this site is about. Not perfection, or trying to impress anyone. Just good food, shared with the people you love.