Welcome to the Raumati Kitchen Diaries, the mad ramblings of an aging domestic engineer. This concept came about after I quit my job and wanted to take some time off; working in the garden, playing golf and generally living my best life. After three months of this foray into oblivion, The Wife told me to get my act together and do something useful and now you are reading about it.

It is a concept born out of my love of food, whether that be cooking it, eating it or growing it. I have always loved to cook, even in my single years after pulling a twelve hour shift in the office, I would come home and cook myself something from scratch (yes and then sit down and eat it by myself, sad I know). This love was amplified, when I met The Wife (she wasn’t The Wife at the time, that would just be weird calling someone The Wife when you’ve just met them, I wasn’t a stalker).  Let me start again, when I met the lady who was to become The Wife (three years later), we nurtured our joint love of food and it became a hobby, a partnership and even at times a source of competition.

Then along came The Daughter who although has a similar love of food, isn’t as keen on the creation of it, unless it’s burger night with dad. The Daughter (a sixteen year old at time of concept) is in charge of creative direction and social media, so it’s a family operation.

Also, while we love eating out at all types of restaurants, and cooking many different cuisines, my other love is growing what we eat.  No we don’t live on a farm and our names aren’t Tom and Barbara, but I find nothing more satisfying than growing something from seed and nurturing it, until one day the whole family gets to enjoy it at dinner time. A small vegetable garden can produce a cornucopia of great tasting foods that will not only save you money, but will leave you with a personal feeling of satisfaction and a desire to grow more.

Before quitting my job I had 37 years working in the same industry and the past 25 years at an executive level, so I understand that the key to any successful venture is to have a clear vision and strategy and well defined goals, well this isn’t one of those ventures.  I’m going in with a complete scatter gun approach, there are recipes, reviews, gardening tips, random blogs and even a few completely out of left field posts. It’s a passion project, I just want to share and if you read it and enjoy it, tell a friend, if you don’t that’s fine too.

Just to clarify, I am not a chef, I have not cooking qualifications whatsoever (apart from running a pub kitchen in London in the early nineties and most of that was reheating), so some of my techniques may be completely against what professionals would tell you to do.  I’m not a big believer in precise measurements (I don’t bake) and many of my creations will be somebody else’s recipe that I have tweaked (as you could argue are all recipes), changed the measurements and added a certain je ne sais quoi to mould it into what I believe is the way I like it, I invite you to do the same. My vegetable gardening is no different, I haven’t really read a lot on the subject, so most of it is trial an error, luckily mostly successful.

For full disclosure I am gluten intolerant, no it’s not a lifestyle choice, it’s something that I discovered at the age of 40 after 40 years of wondering what was going on. It changed my life, but I’m not anti-gluten or trying to beat a drum, I feed The Wife and The Daughter gluten everyday. So while the recipes aren’t all gluten free, I do include tips to make them so, if they weren’t already.

I hope that you enjoy reading, cooking, growing, watching them as much as I did creating them…