The Culinary Black Sheep of the Family

I am the bad cook in my family. When I was younger jokes were always made about the time that I confused teaspoon and tablespoons when putting baking powder in the pancake mix (I was 8!!) and it kind of stuck.

It might be partially because my family has so many good cooks in it.

My mum is the queen of making the most simple dishes taste incredible and inventive cooking. She's the mum who cooked soufflés for us as babies and always made killer school lunches and weeknight dinners, despite working full time. She's also the kind of person who hates eating at restaurants very often because she thinks that her food is better (and a lot of the time it is).

My dad is fantastic at the gluttons food, he makes all those comforting meals that are firm favourites and make me drool; roasts, casseroles, curries, decadent desserts...the list goes on. He grows his own chillis and "gigantoes" (giant tomatoes) and bakes bread a couple times a week.

My sister was always the sibling who was trusted to cook at home, and if we had family come over it would always be her that took over the kitchen for the day to whip up whatever feast she had decided on. She is a host through and through and love the organisation of throwing a food-based event.

In the wider family, one of my uncles is a chef who has cooked for people like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and my other uncle specialises in curry nights that my grandpa enthusiastically takes part in.

All of us have stacks of cookbooks at home, and some kind of love for food and cooking is definitely in our blood. But somehow, until my mid/late-twenties I was always known as not being able to cook well, and I kind of subscribed to that as well. I didn't think I was very good at cooking.

But something changed when I came back from China and was craving the food that I had been eating in local restaurants everyday. I couldn't find anything that quite hit the spot in London, and so I had to do it myself. Just over a year later and I have an instagram purely dedicated to food (#influencer), I experiment with long long cooking projects, and I started my Laowai Supper Club dinner parties to share my love of Chinese food to a wider audience. Who would have thought?

Now that I cook a lot more often, and attempt much complex food that I would never have dreamt of before, that label of being the bad cook in the family is slowly drifting away. I can cook, I just have a very specific niche that I really like to perfect. It's gratifying, after always being told to stay away from the food, to now being asked how to cook certain dishes. Having my mum and sister do my instagram live cook along, and teaching my younger brothers to make noodles, was a small validation that I am coming up towards the lofty heights of the other cooks in my family!

Since we currently all have a lot of extra time to cook at the moment (thanks Coronavirus) I am finding my confidence is growing to try different cuisines and techniques. It turns out that I really like project cooking. Cooking that is detailed and takes a long, long time. The kind of cooking where you're in the kitchen for the whole day and then the food is devoured in half an hour. I may still be a very slow chopper, which probably contributes to the long hours in the kitchen, but I enjoy the mediative process to working slowly through a process with some trashy TV or music in the background.

Chinese food will always be my first love, but now I'll keep dabbling in the other varied cuisines of the world. The important thing to me is that I keep learning, and keep cooking!