Cooking is an art - The chef identity

Cooking is a struggle anyway, but when you have a learning disability and being visually impaired is a bigger struggle.

Say you have a recipe on the table or cooking instructions on the back of something what you want to cook and you can’t read it or begin to understand what it is telling you to do there any many different things you do.

I love watching cooking programmes like The Great British Bake Off what creates amazing cakes and all different pastry items or Saturday Kitchen live on a weekend where they create all different tasty but complicated foods.

Being able to cook my own food, whenever I thought about trying to cook, I found it scary and frightening. But one day I decided that I wanted to try to cook.

I thought let’s start with the very basics like being able to create toast in a toaster with butter on top. I know it sounds stupid but I didn’t know how to use the toaster. When I managed to do this, I thought Okay what’s the next thing that would be easy but a little bit more complicated.

I decided to make soup out of a can of course. I had to learn how to turn the stove on and set it to a temperature and started cooking.

I started to build up my skills and started to make meals from scratch and chop ingredients up and started to follow simple recipes.

I found this quote from Jose Andres:

“Simple ingredients prepared in a simple way - that’s the best way to take your everyday cooking to a higher level.”

This quote makes me think that you can create amazing food from just simple ingredients. When doing this you are developing your skills of creating different foods. In Project27 we have a cooking section that has many recipes and one of my favourite recipes is the Asparagus bacon bundles and it is so simple. This recipe has only 3 main steps to do.

The 3 mains steps are one snapping off the ends of the asparagus and boiling them. Two take some of the asparagus and wrap it in bacon. Three finally lay the wrapped asparagus and put it in baking tin and add cheese to is and cook.

To see the full recipe, go to the cookbook chapter and you can find many more tasty recipes there.

Another quote that inspires me is by Will.I.Am “If you are a chef, no matter how good a chef you are, it’s not good cooking for yourself; the joy is in cooking for others - it’s the same with music. “

This quote is another great quote about food and being a chief as you can do it to enjoy yourself and cook for others. Being able to cook for others is a great way to show off your skills and progress of how far you have come from not being able to cook for yourself.

As the title says cooking is an art and it is true as you practice making the recipe perfect and if you fail you try again and learn from what you got wrong and you try again.

Cooking for friends and family is the best way to get feedback and show off your skills. They will give you complements and they will appreciate being cooked for and it will give your confidence and a boost to your motivation.