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Day 1
Updated: Aug 31
In The Beginning
When we first met on the 21st of September 2002, we were both almost three decades into our lives and food had sustained us in varying shapes and forms – albeit in starkly contrasting ways. Ali had a complicated relationship with food that fluctuated between consuming only milk and toast for an entire summer, the cabbage soup diet, becoming a taekwondo champion and downing a full 16 inches in Pizza Paradise at 4am in Edinburgh. Bob on the other hand successfully survived on Pot Noodles and Clarks Bakery for the best part of his twenties and had decided he would never eat another tomato for the rest of his life.
Ali had the edge on feeding anyone and everyone. The designated family caterer and cake maker, she’d already competed in two successive Masterchef regional finals, met Jamie Oliver, hosted monthly themed dinner parties and catered for 250 at a ceilidh. For one such themed dinner party, she enrolled in a three-week Mexican night school to perfect the art of guacamole and tacos so she could host “Cinco De Mayo” as authentically as possible. It was the time of gastronomic alchemy. Foams, dehydration, sous vide, spherification, the core classical processes were being pushed into the 21st century and Ali was here for it. Included in this obsession was the curation of a staggering library of cookbooks and she devoted bookshelves to Larousse, River Café, Jamie Oliver, La Cucina, Conran and, of course, Delia’s anthology amongst many others. Through a series of rapid dates, Ali successfully infected Bob with the obsession and once he had voluntarily read – cover to cover- every one of Ali’s 150 cookbooks, she decided he had sufficiently proved his worth. He declared the “Conran Cookbook” (1997) to be the greatest publication of all time and to this day, it’s one of our most heavily thumbed.
The second phase of the campaign involved Ali cooking for Bob. It was a simple plan, but when well executed provides an impossible web for the prey and escape is virtually impossible. Ali had learned an astonishing technique for hand lubricating a roast chicken in butter, resting it to perfection and serving with sweet carrots and pesto parmesan mash. Bob’s fate was sealed. Pesto parmesan mash for the win.
Little did we know, food would ultimately become the absolute focus of our daily lives. Something that began as a love affair over shared, home-cooked food, took a detour through an international arena for ten years and ended up back home feeding others.
This is Day One in our series sharing 31 Food Memories for the 31 Days of August.
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