That's me. I'm 40-something years old and I've done a lot of things in my life, some of them bad, some of them good. I turned vegetarian when I was 17 and I count that as one of the better things I've done up until now. At present, I'm doing more or less what I've always wanted to do when I 'grow up'. I travel a lot, soaking up experiences in different parts of the world, I enjoy cooking and experiment with recipes I find on my travels, I have time to write about my experiences and I work (in the 'necessary to earn a living' sense) as little as possible. I always dreamed of being a freelance writer or an artist of some kind but quite a long time ago I realised that would never happen in the normal sense - i.e. being good enough at it to earn a living - so I decided to make it happen another way. My 'system for survival' involves living on a very tight budget, spending a lot of time in countries which are relatively cheap to live in, doing a few hours of well paid work here and there every so often and generally keeping an eye open and an ear to the ground for opportunities. I think I'm at a stage in my life now where I have enough experience to get by in a variety of situations and solve most of the logistical problems associated with my kind of lifestyle, but I must say that I couldn't do it without the support of my wife, best friend and travelling companion, Sveta, who feels much the same about life as I do.
These days, in the spring and autumn, we're usually somewhere in central Asia or the Caucasus - Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, in winter it's often India or South-east Asia and we usually spend some time in Europe in summer. That's been more or less the pattern over the last eight years or so, though we've started to make more frequent side trips here and there and like to believe that any day we could just drop everything and go somewhere new (it's handy having a web-site - you can take it with you).
So I've visited a lot of countries - also been in a few Arabian Gulf countries, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, bits of China, Russia, all over Europe - but I still haven't been in Africa, Australia or America and I'd really love to visit all those continents. I'd also like to see a lot more of South-east Asia, so there's a whole bunch of travelling still to be done. Part of the difficulty is that as you travel, you find places you like and make friends, so you have 'old haunts' that you want to keep returning to as well as new places you'd like to visit. That's my experience anyway.
Let's go back a bit and I'll tell you a little bit about my background. I grew up in the west of Scotland where I attended a state comprehensive 'factory fodder' school, except that by the time I got there there were no factories left in the area (I go into my school life in more detail in my short story, School Daze). I was one of the few who, despite the system, managed to get enough qualifications to go to university, although being spectacularly unprepared for the experience, I got thrown out pretty quickly. Later, after a few years of mucking around, working in bars, digging peoples gardens and stuff, I got a philosophy degree at another university but that was in the eighties when jobs were hard to come by and it didn't make much difference to my employment prospects. I started travelling when I got fed up doing odd jobs, having the electricity cut off on a regular basis and generally having to duck and dive to survive. Teaching English got me started travelling. A friend told me about a certificate that only took a month and a bunch of cash to get. I borrowed the money and two months later I was in a class pretending to be a teacher. I actually became quite good at it over time and I got to travel a lot. Teaching abroad can be quite paradoxical, in the sense that you're in a wonderful exotic country but people are demanding a forty hour working week from you for an often meagre salary. Usually, you have neither the time nor the money to explore your surroundings. Eventually I realised that, although I loved the travelling, I hated the teaching, so I packed in the latter. I still do bits of English-teaching-related stuff as a consultant to help pay for our travelling, but I try to keep it to a minimum. I've been travelling now for about fifteen years and I had the idea of doing the cookbook a while ago, but it's only in the past few years I've been able to work out the logistics of how to do it and have the courage to put it into practice.
I've been cooking for a while now. I started when I was a young lad. As I said, I first became a vegetarian when I was a teenager, just before I went to university. I stayed in a hall of residence and ate breakfast and dinner in the dining hall there. The vegetarian food was terrible. The evening meal was usually a salad consisting of lettuce and tomato, grated cheese and something weird like cottage cheese and sultanas or a few tinned peach slices. There was always a fresh half to the salad and a left-over-from-yesterday half. This meant you could predict what the left-over-from-yesterday half would be the next day, though occasionally you would be thrown when a left-over-from-the-day-before-yesterday portion was inserted into each salad. Sometimes that was even lettuce. Eating such salads day after day, especially during a northern-Scottish winter was no fun. I was a growing lad and I was always hungry. One freezing day I cracked and had fish and chips. I was reported instantly. The head cook came out to the front and started shouting, 'You're supposed to be a vegetarian. Now there's going to be an extra vegetarian meal left over. What am I supposed to do with that then?' She wasn't very happy when I told her.
I ate a few more non-veg meals before I decided to quit going to the dining hall, even though I'd paid for meals until the end of term. There was a kitchen beside my room but there was no cooking equipment except a kettle, so I bought a frying pan, a pot, a plate and a set of cutlery (I already had a mug) and started learning to cook. Most of the things I cooked were horrible. I just tried putting things together, like a tin of baked beans, a tin of sweet corn and some chopped onion for example. I gave up on recipe books fairly quickly. The recipes always seemed to require some piece of equipment I didn't have and I couldn't afford to buy anything else (I was already in the process of running up a huge overdraft).
I still use much the same strategy and I use much the same equipment. I've learned how to simplify and adapt recipes from books with confidence and I've also learned how to figure out what's in a dish and how it was prepared - at least well enough to recreate something approximating the original. I've also grown bold enough to ask people to show me how they cook. When I travel I always carry a notebook and pencil to use on such occasions. Most people are willing to show off their skills if asked politely.
The idea of writing recipes with a bit of blarney about how they originated had been kicking around in the back of my mind for years and originally I was thinking of the cookbook in terms of hard copy. It was all a bit 'pie in the sky' though, as I couldn't imagine how I could get it published, but I did start writing recipes on the computer. That was a while ago now but the breakthrough, in terms of motivation and the possibility of doing it on-line, came in Turkey over the winter of 2001-2.
I had come up with the on-line idea shortly before, but there were a few obstacles in the way. I was working a lot, teaching long hours. Our telephone connection at the time was dreadful so it was both expensive and extremely frustrating to do anything on the internet. I didn't know the first thing about creating a web-site either and my first attempts to get something up were painfully slow and the results were badly designed and rather amateurish looking. I didn't know how search engines worked and I remember being really disappointed that my site didn't come up on Yahoo. I didn't realise I had to submit it.
I don't think my site is very professional looking even now, but I'm not really interested in progressing too far in that area of design. There are a lot of web-sites around with high quality graphics and effects but they're a nightmare to navigate and take ages to load. I'm more into easy access and fast loading as I think that's what people want. Tell me if I'm wrong.
So what happened in Turkey? I went there to do a teaching job at a university in the capital. I took my notebook and when I eventually got it hooked up to the internet the connection was extremely fast and very cheap. It took two months to get the connection and by that time I was thoroughly fed up with the working conditions and the demands being placed on the staff and I decided to pack in the job after the initial probationary period. I was so fed up that I made up my mind to try to give up teaching altogether and that's where the motivation came from to learn more about creating a web-site. Over the following few months I learned how to write HTML code and put keywords and descriptions into my pages - all that kind off stuff. The work was taking a long time as I was doing everything manually on-line but the experience was very educational. Later, a friend introduced me to 'Dreamweaver', a programme that allows you to write pages off-line and then load them all at once.
The university administration were very unforgiving and made life as difficult as possible before I left. At the time I hated them but I don't hold grudges for long. I got a lot out of the experience(I wrote a little bit about it in Bay leaves). I found the motivation to change my life and did it. Besides, I escaped. Those poor people are still stuck in that university. I even feel a bit sorry for them now.
So, who am I writing recipes for? 'Vegetarians' would seem the obvious answer, wouldn't it? That needs a bit of qualification, but. There are all different kinds of vegetarians. I don't eat eggs, but some 'vegetarians' do. We've all got different reasons for being veggie and different ideas of what it means. That's good. There are enough rules in life without making more for ourselves. Meat eaters often make the mistake of challenging vegetarians to justify themselves. Comments like 'but you're wearing leather shoes.' and so on, are common. So what? What business is it of theirs? Why don't they feel obliged to defend their flesh-eating habits?
I might have a bit of a rant about various things during the recipes, but that's just me expressing my emotions at the minute. I don't hold a systematic set of beliefs about being veggie. Life's too short for that and it's not about that kind of thing. I wouldn't know where to start anyway.
What I'm trying to say is that these recipes are for anyone who wants to try them. If you're not really veggie but you want to eat less meat, okay. These are the recipes for you. Want to cook something nice for vegetarian guests? Come in and have a look. And if you're already veggie or vegan, great. I hope you find something new here to inspire you. If my recipes give anyone the inspiration or confidence to try being vegetarian then that will be a wonderful thing.
And what if you're not interested in cooking? ...or just canny be bothered? Well, I do loads of other stuff too. There are photo-galleries to browse, cartoons and short stories....and you'll notice that most of the recipes have fairly extensive introductions which I hope are entertaining....so even if you don't do the recipe, you might find something interesting just reading the page.
And is everything I write in the introductions to the recipes true? Well, maybe not. But I'm not in the business of providing hard facts. The purpose of this site is to entertain people and encourage them to cook and eat well, think about a variety of different things and maybe even become vegetarian if they aren't already. I'm not even sure half the stuff is true myself and I reserve the right to change my opinion on any subject. That's what life is about, isn't it? There are, however, some good sites around which specialize in providing solid scientific evidence for the vegetarian thing. You might find some of them on my links page. But remember, just because it sounds convincing doesn't mean it's true. It's worth being especially careful when you're reading something that you want to believe because it supports your own views. Uncle Lou says, 'Don't believe anything you read and only half of what you see.' This is generally good advice.