Hi! I’m Danielle and cooking is my thing. In fact, it’s my favourite way to procrastinate doing ANY other task.

I’m a self-taught home cook with zero paper-based credentials in the kitchen. But I am a damn good cook – creative, resourceful and fast (and sometimes slow). I can follow a recipe effortlessly, and can veer off and freestyle on a whim.

I’m a passionate and joyful cook, and my dream is to change the collective story that tells us cooking is a chore.

Can you get on board with this dream?

Imagine if all women all across the land questioned their stories around cooking (cooking sucks, I’m a bad cook, I hate deciding what to cook, what’s the point?, I can’t afford to eat well, etc) and felt joyful, content and confident in cooking from scratch? (And along the way, supported the little guys: the suppliers who are doing SO much good for the land and their communities.)

It may seem trite, and you may even think I’m taking women’s lib back a step, but it’s quite the opposite. My Grandmother knew that cooking dinner every night was an indispensable and loving contribution to her family. What if we saw it that way? What if WE valued that work? How different would our days feel?

I’m here to show you how with a combination of skills, the right tools and a fresh outlook, you can do amazing things in the kitchen, and actually enjoy it.

If you’re fist pumping the air and shouting ‘hell yeah!’, then stick around.

“Thermomixing doesn’t count as cooking“

On my journey of teaching myself to cook, I bought many kitchen tools and trinkets, but I was firmly anti-Thermomix for a long time – five years to be exact.  I bought every other appliance under the sun, but a Thermomix was firmly out of bounds on principle.

I was judgemental back then. VERY judgemental. 

“That’s not cooking,” I said.

“My kids need to learn how to REALLY cook, just like I did,” I said. 

But oh how wrong I was.

Once there were two kids on the scene, things were starting to feel hectic, and I was eating my words with SO MANY things. Did you also go from idealistic mother of one child to shouty mother of two? I was doing and saying things I never imagined I would! So, since all my judgements about those ‘other’ mothers were wrong, maybe my judgement of the Thermomix was wrong too?!  

I had taught myself to cook everything from scratch to this point including sourdough, broth, ferments, baking, dips, every aspect of our meals etc, and I enjoyed it too much to give it up. So I decided it was time to explore the Thermomix. 

And the rest is history. The Thermomix is as brilliant as everyone said it was, and I was WRONG all those years that I judged Thermomix cooking as ‘not cooking’. What does that even mean??

I cook with both the Thermomix and the stovetop, so this page will remain an inclusive space where the Thermomix is used as a tool, not as the centre of my kitchen. (So don’t expect this to be a Thermomix blog).

I was once the picky eater of your worst nightmares

My earliest memories of food are not joyful ones because I was a picky eater of nightmarish proportions. While I didn’t enjoy the food I pushed around my plate at dinner, I do remember watching my family enjoy theirs. My Grandmother did all the cooking, and she took pride in preparing it. Sure, she complained of the weight of having to cook every day, but her complaints had a different tone to mothers today. 

It was hard work, but there was no alternative. Buying takeaway or frozen meals just wasn’t an option for a mile-long list of reasons, and it went without saying that eating nourishing, delicious, home-cooked food was an absolute necessity in life. She knew that we knew that without her cooking, life would be bleak. And so, she was valued. 

Fast forward into my 20s and thankfully I finally came to love food. Suddenly I ate everything, and that interest grew in direct proportion with my interest in cooking. The more I learned to cook (by reading a million cook books and watching a million cooking shows), the more I appreciated eating. 

I cook very differently from my Grandmother, but at my core, she taught me everything I know: 

• Clean up as you go
• food matters
• grocery shopping is a joy
• growing some of your own food is a pleasure
• a splash of this and a dash of that is the best way to measure
• with just a few tweaks, the same ingredients will produce completely different dishes. 
• food is a spectrum, which means it’s really all the same.

Thank you for being here, and please, in your journey toward loving cooking, borrow my enthusiasm for now. 

Love,

Danielle