Hello, my name is Lucky 🙂 Welcome!
I was born and grew up in Australia, a land of wonderful produce, fresh air and wide open spaces. Since I grew up in the eighties though, with a family that didn’t like to cook, my experience was of fast food and home prepared packaged meals.
By the time I was sixteen, I decided that cooking was something I really wanted to learn, but that home economics at school wasn’t really where I wanted to be. I wanted to be outside, watching things grow and learning about the entire cycle of how things end up on our plate. And then take that knowledge back to my own kitchen and try things out, like some mad alchemist in an old movie.
As it turns out, I was (am) a fairly stubborn person and convinced myself that I could learn everything I needed from books. Yes, I know how little sense that makes, but I was young! I did manage to get out into the world at times. I had friends whose parents DID love cooking, so I could often be found in the kitchen, asking questions and generally making a (helpful) nuisance of myself.
When I grew up and headed off to University, I traveled as an overseas student to Aberystwyth on the windy and lovely coast of Wales. It was here, due to having not much money, that I was really forced to improve my cooking. Finding practical ways to make a small budget count also meant I became much better acquainted with finding locally grown food, since cooking at home really did keep me more full than the supermarket ready meals my fellow students were eating.
I like to think of that time as my true apprenticeship, since I was learning on the fly and there was a lot of pressure to make hearty tasty food. No matter what, I had to eat it!
Slowly over the years, I got better. Through trial and error, I learned to be braver with cooking, to work with the ingredients and not force them, and to plan meals according to a budget, what season I was in, and of course what I wanted to eat. That one was important.
I returned to Australia, went through the many stresses of life, and found that my time spent pottering around the kitchen was a way I could feel creative and centered. My friends and family also benefited by this time, as somewhere along my journey I had learned to love cooking for large groups of people. It’s probably not surprising that this made me very popular, especially around birthdays.
One thing that has never changed for me over the years, is the importance of finding the best and freshest ingredients when I cook. There’s something very comforting about local seasonal ingredients, and products made from them are always the tastiest I find.
A few years after returning, I began living and working in Melbourne, a wonderful city full of amazing places to eat, and I began to spend less time in my kitchen and more time in restaurants. For many years my work was stressful and busy and I was in the office for ten or twelve hours a day. Regardless of my cooking efforts, I had instead become locked in a corporate prison, escaping only long enough to eat out, and then home to (briefly) sleep before getting up and doing it all again. There had to be a better way.
Finally, after what seemed a lifetime, I left the city. There is a romance that was the catalyst for my move to the country, but to be honest, it would have happened anyway. I missed that connection to the great outdoors.
My partner already had this rural living thing downpat, so we moved into a converted miners cottage on half an acre of land and I got down to the business of reconnecting with my kitchen, garden, and sharing my recipes and food with lots of people. H.E.R. homemade was born, and here we are!
