The other day, my son asked me for a “mock recipe” for some sausage rolls I had made.
Mock, apparently, meaning that I cook from memory and instinct rather than from a recipe.
He wasn’t entirely wrong. Most of what comes out of my kitchen starts with a vague idea, a look in the fridge, and a willingness to adjust as I go. Onion and garlic are almost always involved. After that, it depends entirely on what’s on hand, what needs using, and what I feel like eating. If you asked me to recreate something I made a few months ago, I would struggle to give you anything resembling a precise recipe. It would depend on whether I had fresh tomatoes, canned tomatoes, or a jar of sauce. Whether I used cream, sour cream, Parmesan, or simply made do with what was available.
That doesn’t mean I don’t read recipes. I read them constantly. Cookbooks, magazines, clipped articles, saved posts I fully intend to make one day. Occasionally, I follow one properly. More often, I read several, absorb what I need, and then do something slightly different.
Some recipes stick. Gumbo is one of them. I have a method I return to every time, but it’s never quite the same. The roux behaves differently, the ingredients shift slightly, and the result follows suit. It’s close enough to be familiar, but never identical.
Other things come from necessity. I spent most of my adult life in South Africa, where certain foods simply didn’t exist. So I learned how to make them. Totino’s-style pizza rolls, for example. Swedish meatballs, taught to me by actual Swedes visiting over the holidays. One thing led to another - meatballs turned into bitterballen, pizza rolls into empanadas and spring rolls. It tends to happen that way.
Then there were the phases. Budget cooking. Batch cooking. Freezer cooking. Cooking for school lunches. Trying to recreate Mexican food in Johannesburg before it was widely available. Vegan cooking, which reshaped everything for a time - some parts easily, others less so. Waste-free cooking, seasonal cooking, bulk buying, preserving, refining. Each one left something behind that still shows up in my kitchen now.
If it sounds inconsistent, it probably is. I tend to move fully into something, then out again. Or, more generously, I’m interested in everything.
Food has always been central for me. Not just cooking, but the entire process - shopping, reading, planning, adjusting. Feeding people properly is one of the few things that consistently feels right.
Oddly, eating is probably my least favourite part.
That’s not to say I don’t enjoy it. I do. I love restaurants, and I will spend far too long reading a menu before deciding what to order. I have favourites for specific dishes, and I will go out of my way for a particular kind of meal when the mood strikes. Sometimes I choose a restaurant based on a feeling I’m chasing rather than a dish I’ve already decided on.
And inevitably, I take that experience home with me and try to recreate it - not exactly, but closely enough to satisfy whatever it was that I was looking for in the first place.
Over time, the kitchen has filled accordingly. Ingredients, tools, equipment - some essential, some less so. My fridge is always full, my freezer even more so. There’s always something to cook, something to use, something to figure out.
Which is how a pack of hot Italian sausage, a clipped recipe, and whatever else was already in the kitchen turned into sausage rolls - and a request for a “mock recipe.”
That’s probably the most accurate description I’ll ever get.