Pandemic Cooking: Fed up and Locked Down

Part diary, part food blog and all cookery book, one man's light-hearted exploration of cooking during the pandemic. Over 100 planned recipes from unexpectedly tasty success to total disaster and take-out. Enjoy the journey yourself or give as a gift to the significant cook in your life. From chocolate cake to venison via salads, chowder and fish pie there is an idea for every taste.

This is half diary, half recipe book and two thirds a kind of blog about food. That makes it nearly two books in one - now there’s a bargain!

It started because I get quite excited about making food and am fairly vague about recipes. This is generally fine, but has led to some interesting calamities too (the solid couscous motorcycle helmet to name just one). It also means that when I do get it right and I / we think “that was fantastic!”, I can rarely repeat the experience.
So, this book was intended to rectify that. As you probably guessed from the title, this was mostly written during the recent COVID-19 lockdown(s). I’ve not laboured much on the difficulties and inconveniences of that, it is a given. Like most people, we stuck to the rules and focused on living and getting through it.

For me, a large part of that survival was cooking, which I (generally) find relaxing and fun. For those of you who want to know such things, there are approximately 100 recipes in here, made over a period of 12 months of varying levels of lockdown, May 2020 to 2021. Technically, for the purists amongst us, there are actually about 80 recipes and then I made some improvements and made some of them again.

I invite you to join me for a light-hearted view of my food-related lockdown experience. Try some of the recipes; there is plenty of variety from chocolate cake to venison via salads, chowder and fish pie. If you’re really good, I might invite you for dinner and share. Based on my track record so far, you might be lucky (or not) with the quality of dinner…