My cooking journey

What inspired me to write this newsletter

As a child, I loved food and I loved cooking.

Every night, I would come into the kitchen and watch my mother making the tea*, whether that was a vegetable curry or just putting a Charlie Bigham’s** ready meal in the oven.

At the weekends, which I would usually spend with my grandparents, I would watch my grandma make a variety of delicious baked treats: apple crumble, cheese straws, fresh scones - classic comfort foods.

Sometimes, she even made a lasagne. It was delicious. But there was always something left on my plate - the mince from the ragù.

I don’t know why I left it. I didn’t particularly hate the taste, or the texture - I just couldn’t make myself eat it.

This is the story of my confusing relationship with meat and how I learnt to cook for myself - from a child carnivore to an adult veggie to a meat-eater once again.

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From a young age, I would enjoy helping my parents and grandparents cook food. I enjoyed cooking a lot, but ultimately I just fell out of the habit.

Even when I wasn’t cooking, I had a confusing relationship with meat. I was seemingly stuck in the cycle of ‘eat meat - not enjoy it - try a different type of meat’. Weeks would go by where I would buy some sort of meaty ready meal, like a beef lasagne or chicken curry, either in hope of miraculously liking it or because I was encouraged to eat meat by my family. But the same thing would happen every time - I would love the flavour of the meal and enjoy eating it, but I just could not make myself finish all the meat. There would be plates with piles of mince or half-chewed bits of curried chicken lining up next to the sink, and I couldn’t see a way out.

When I rediscovered my love of cooking, I would make largely vegetarian meals - what I now call ‘naturally vegetarian’, meaning that the original recipe does not include meat - sometimes experimenting with fried bacon or a couple of ham sandwiches. This helped me realise what types of meat I actually enjoyed:

• Streaky bacon - I loved the flavour of streaky bacon so much that I could ignore what I called its ‘strange’ texture. Despite this, I remember peeling off the strips of fat as a child as there was something about them I couldn’t stand. Maybe infantile fussiness, maybe a profound longing for vegetarianism.

• Wafer-thin ham - I liked the taste of ham, and in this form, there wasn’t much to argue about the texture, especially when made into a pinwheel sandwich (my grandma’s picnic speciality).

• Fish cakes - Although I started to go off these after my childhood, I remember being by the sea with my family in north Devon (Combe Martin, if anyone knows it) and getting a fish cake from the local chippy. Because it had the texture of mashed potatoes, and the fishy taste was combined with the grease of a thousand long-gone chips, there wasn’t much about these I could argue about.

I would love to know if anyone who is vegetarian has had the same experience with meat, so please leave a comment and say what meat - if any - you enjoyed before becoming vegetarian or vegan.

Anyway, you might have noticed something of a running theme from these findings - I liked the taste of meat, but there was something about the texture that I didn’t like. I had had this problem since I was little, but I never bothered to think about it much - and this is the real reason why I became vegetarian.

Of course, I have an understanding of what happens to get from a healthy cow to a juicy steak on someone’s plate, and I understand that this is not great from an animal welfare point of view, but as much as I want to pretend to be an incredibly moral person, it just isn’t why I became vegetarian. The truth is that I hate meat and have done ever since I started eating solid food.

You may think that becoming vegetarian would have restricted my cooking, but, actually, the opposite is true - it supercharged my discovery of new dishes, recipes and cuisines without having to bother with meat.

It enabled me explore more food than I ever had done, trying all sorts of meat substitutes - a term I hate to use - and diverse ingredients, from aquafaba (vile) to za’atar (good in anything).

It meant that I could develop several of my favourite recipes to be the best vegetarian food I could possibly make - including my lentil lasagne, my three-bean chilli, and my butternut squash risotto (actually an adapted recipe from my grandmother, but I’ll talk about that another time).

At this stage, it may look like being a vegetarian was great for me, and in truth, I loved being a vegetarian cook. But the problem actually lay whenever I went to a restaurant.

I love eating out, despite the skyrocketing prices, so naturally I wasn’t just going to stop when I became vegetarian. The first few weeks of eating out with my new diet were fine, and I enjoyed being able to choose from the veggie menu without feeling guilty - for want of a better word - for not choosing the meat option.

But after a couple of months of eating out and watching my family and friends order all the meaty pleasures they wanted, I was beginning to dislike the restrictiveness of being a vegetarian. Even though I didn’t like meat much, it doesn’t mean I never wanted any, and seeing my family ordering bacon sandwiches while I was stuck with a sickeningly healthy rocket and avocado bagel was difficult to cope with.

Nonetheless, I continued soldiering on with my vegetarian diet, despite the ever growing pressure to eat meat, but eventually, it started to crumble.

The first crack appeared when I stopped bothering with vegetarian substitutes for rennet and gelatine. ‘Plant-based Italian hard cheese’ is not the same as parmesan. Sometimes a dish just needs a bit of lamb enzymes to bring out the flavour. It may not sound like much, but it placed a doubt in my mind over the relevance of being vegetarian.

The second crack appeared after watching my mother fry some bacon. The smell was lovely, and I couldn’t help myself nibbling away at a slice.

This is arguably the point at which the diet collapsed, but it wasn’t as simple as deciding I was a meat eater again and stuffing steaks down my gob. While I enjoyed the freedom of being able to eat whatever I wanted, I had to teach myself to eat meat again, the textures feeling quite alien after not having eaten them in two years.

Eventually, however, I learnt to love them again. And I’ve even diversified beyond my usual bacon and ham, you’ll be pleased to hear - I’m now experimenting with chicken curries and beef mince ragù.

So yes, my relationship with meat and food in general has always been complicated. And I say that while eating a homemade full English breakfast and a vegan oat milk coffee.

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Not a Vegetarian is the story of my cooking journey from my unique perspective of being a carnivore-turned-vegetarian-turned-carnivore. Every week on a Saturday, I’ll share a story from the world of food - whether that’s my first ever cooking experience or just a recipe I enjoy. Some weeks, I may not manage it. Others, I will. But one thing is certain - I want you to be a part of it.

So if you’re reading this, I would love for you to leave a comment. Share your experiences with meat, favourite foods, or even just a story about food. And if you’ve enjoyed this article, please spread the word! Tell a few friends, leave a like, or restack this post. And, of course, subscribing would mean the world to me.

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*Evening meal, as they say in the north of England.

**A British brand of ready meal.