Travelling around the world for a year was truly amazing experience in terms of learning about new cultures and trying different food. But it also meant that being on the road and camping most of the time got very repetitive in terms of what you’re able to cook on a camping stove and how much money you can spend on food whilst travelling. In October 2017, when I got back into a full time job, renting a flat, etc. I started trying new recipes to be healthier and also to experiment with ingredients I have never tried before.

Since then I have gone through so many recipes but there has been a few things I noticed. Most recipes I found have long stories about how the person came to the recipe or talking about the ingredients benefits etc. It’s very interesting to read those when learning about new food, different lifestyle or when you just like to read a nice story. It’s usually accompanied by 5-10 beautiful photos of the process and the meal that of course make you hungry as soon as you look at them. Awesome it works! 🙂 But on day to day basis I just scroll to the main things, I need, in the post.

First thing when I come across recipe or picture that looks good, I search for a specific ingredient I want to cook with or want to try and I check what the ingredients are and how long it’s going to take me to cook it. As you can imagine, when I get home from work at 7pm I want to cook something that is easy and won’t take hours to make. The price of all the ingredients is very important too because food is the one thing you can save money on when trying to lower you monthly cost.

I noticed that I never had time to read the stories about the recipes. Scrolling up and down in between the photos, ingredients and method becomes difficult when my hands are dirty. I also constantly jump to different websites to convert cups into grams, millilitres etc. Together with gathering more and more recipes, some in a cookbook, some on different website, Pinterest or little pieces of paper I had to figure out something that would work for me.

I decided to create a website where I would add all the recipes I tried and would like to be able to reach to them in the future. These are few bullet points I based this website on:
To have only one or two photos of the meal because usually they are all the same just from different angles.
Simplify and organise the recipes so it’s quick and easy to follow without scrolling up and down too much. This includes putting ingredients in order you need to use them because there is nothing worse than not being able to find the amounts quickly.
Have all my notes at the end of the recipe including what you can substitute with what, what worked and what didn’t. Things I would like to know next time before I cook it.
I find really useful when the first thing you can see is the time it will take you to cook this meal and a number of portions you get out of this recipe. I will also add a rough price of the whole meal because that can be really useful for budgeting how much money you spend on food or choosing recipes according to how much money you have left. I am working the prices according to Sainsbury’s supermarket in the UK but it can be less or more depending where you do your shopping and on the quality. In my opinion, some things you can buy the cheapest but some things, the cheaper it is, the quality is worse and worse and can be harmful for your health long term.
And of course, most of the recipes I have are from other people so I like to put the original source in to credit them.
I also set up a separate page on my website to put all the possible measurement conversions to have easy access to it when I need it.
And a last thing is this section you’re reading right now. I created a blog section on my website where I will be writing about interesting things I discovered or learned about topics like Food waste, healthy lifestyle, etc.

I am a creative person and I love photography but this website is still work in progress so at the moment the photos of my recipes are mostly phone snapshots in the evenings when the light in the room is not great. So everything will get better in time, I promise. 🙂
I’m trying to live a minimal life which means owing things I actually need to minimise the amount of material things (I will be writing a different article about this). So that means all my photos will be created with things I already have at home because I need them. I will try to avoid buying things just for the sake of being able to take nice photo of my dinner.

As I said this website was created primarily for my personal use but why not to share it with people like to explore new lifestyles, try new recipes and cook cheap and quick.

I appreciate if you let me know any comments, tips for my recipes and website to improve.

Thank you

With Love
V