Pull up a chair

If you’d told 20-year-old me — standing in a Glasgow kitchen, learning to make my mum’s stovies — that I’d one day be cooking in the Western Australian sun with a cookbook collection that’s threatening to take over the house, I’d have laughed.

But here we are.

This blog is the natural next step for someone who loves three things: cooking, collecting recipes, and talking about both. My shelves groan under the weight of everything from well-thumbed Scottish classics to Australian seafood bibles, Greek taverna cookbooks, and far too many Ottolenghi titles. I cook from them all, and I have opinions.

What you’ll find here:

  • Recipes I actually cook — not styled for Instagram, just food that works
  • Cookbook reviews — the honest version. Which ones earn their shelf space, and which ones don’t
  • Stories from the kitchen — the wins, the disasters, and what I learned from both

I’m Scottish by birth, Australian by choice, and a home cook by obsession. I live in Golden Bay, WA with my partner Tom and our two dogs. When I’m not in the kitchen, I’m probably in the garden with a glass of Shiraz, or plotting our next trip to the Greek islands.

No pretension, no food snobbery — just good food, cooked with care.

Let’s get cooking.

— Richard