Melrose and Morgan, Awakening Number 3

Food and I didn’t start out as fast friends. Far from it. I was a pernickity eater as a child. I only ate eggs, fried; chicken, breadcrumbed and panned; fries, hand cut – obviously and no thicker than 5 mm. If those things were not available then no amount of bartering or pleading would induce me to eat. I simply abstained. It goes without saying that I was a very skinny, very annoying child.

By my teenage years I discovered junk food. Things like frozen French fries doused in so much thousand island dressing that they sagged on the plastic fork like limp spaghetti. At home a meal that featured quite a lot was pasta with butter and feta cheese. Every now and then the posh supermarket at the end of our road would import some American cake mixes. My sister and I would make them together and marvel at how good they tasted.  That was one of the highlights in our sleepy Athens suburb. I can’t boast about eating in Michelin starred restaurant as a wee tot like Jay Rayner or mastering a perfect victoria sponge by age 7 like Nigel SlaterAll this to say that the foodie I am today is the result of a slow evolution, a meandering path through some questionable tastes with 3 pivotal food awakenings.The first was moving to Paris when I was 17 and discovering a complex and fascinating world of food, of do’s and don’t’s. Do eat cheese after a meal, never for breakfast.

The second was that after squandering my twenties trying to fit into a variety of moulds I thought would be suitable for me and acceptable for my family and friends I decided to literally screw it and try something radically different. A hobby I had been nurturing furtively which seemed to make me happy but also seemed to be rather frivolous.Enter Leiths. I originally enrolled for just one term, then the second and finally the third. I was convinced that this was it, I had discovered what truly animated me. My enthusiasm got me through many restaurant doors but my lack of skills constantly sabotaged me. It all went pear shaped after a 4 daylong stint at Ottolenghi, where I was moved from salads, to pastry and back to salads again. Like a hot potato that no one wanted to hold for too long. Even before the talk with Yotam, I knew it was not going well.

This is a 5 year old picture

Maybe it speaks of a good life for which I should be grateful but that rejection confounded me. How could it be that after 10 directionless years, I had found something I truly loved and adored and it just… Well it just didn’t love me back? I had no idea how to process that reality. Read more of this post

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