I got here
the long way round.

I have always loved food. Not in the collector's way — I wasn't chasing restaurants or memorising techniques. I loved the ordinary part of it: that a bag of vegetables and forty minutes can turn into something people want to sit down for. Cooking was the thing I did when I wanted to think, and the thing I did when I didn't want to think at all.

Healthy eating came later, and it came the way it comes for a lot of people — not as a resolution, but as a process of elimination. I felt vaguely, persistently unwell for a long stretch of years, in the way that's easy to explain away one week at a time. Tired after eating. Foggy in the afternoons. Fine, mostly. Just not well.

Gluten was the thing. Working that out took embarrassingly long, and once I knew, the first year of cooking around it was genuinely bad. I made a lot of dense, sad bread. I bought the boxed mixes that taste like the box. I assumed that gluten free meant a permanent downgrade — the same food, worse.

What actually changed it was going the other direction entirely. Instead of rebuilding wheat out of substitutes, I started cooking food that was never about flour in the first place. Vegetables in the centre of the plate rather than beside it. Charred, roasted, dressed hard, piled with herbs and nuts and something acidic. Ottolenghi taught me most of that — that a cauliflower can be the whole point of dinner, and that generosity with lemon, tahini and herbs does more work than any technique.

Some of what I cook leans on Medical Medium ideas too — heavy on fruit and leafy greens, wild blueberries, celery, the healing-foods end of things. I'm not evangelical about any of it. I've just noticed which meals leave me feeling good, and I cook those more often.

So that's what this is. Everything on this site is gluten free, because everything I eat is gluten free — there's no separate "normal" version I'm keeping from you. Most of it is vegetable-forward, because that's what I actually want to eat. All of it is written to be read while you're standing at a counter with one hand free.

Because I have tried to cook from the other kind of site. You know the one — you scroll past a childhood memory, three photos of the same bowl, a video that follows you down the page, and a pop-up asking you to subscribe before you have found out how much butter you need.

There is no story before the ingredient list here. The story is on this page, where you can ignore it. The recipes are ingredients, then method, and nothing between them.

The one exception is the pantry, where I name the specific brands I keep buying. If those ever become affiliate links, they'll say so on the page — and the list won't change because of it.