A kitchen that never really closed

Our kitchen was the busiest room in the house. It was small, the oven door never closed properly, and there was almost always something on the stove that somebody was supposed to be watching. Sunday afternoons meant rice, and rice meant a pot of pepper base frying down slowly while the radio played and nobody agreed on anything.

The recipes lived in a shoebox on top of the fridge. Index cards, backs of envelopes, one written on the inside of a cereal packet. Most of them were useless to anyone outside the family. They said things like fry till it looks right and the usual amount of pepper. They assumed you had been standing there the first time, watching over somebody's shoulder.

Why we started writing things down properly

When the first of us moved out, the phone calls started. How long does the stew actually simmer? What does looks right look like? It turned out that the most important parts of every family recipe were the parts nobody had bothered to write down — the ones you only learn by getting them wrong a few times.

So we started again. We cooked each dish repeatedly, wrote down the real timings, and paid attention to the moments where things went sideways. The garlic that turns bitter in the ten seconds you look away. The pancake batter that gets stirred one minute too long. The fried rice that steams instead of frying because the pan was not hot enough.

What we care about

Honest timings, for a start. If a recipe takes ninety minutes, it says ninety minutes. We would rather you knew that before you started than found out at half past seven on a Tuesday.

We also care about the why. Knowing that cold rice fries better than fresh rice is more useful than following one fried rice recipe, because it travels — you can apply it to whatever is in your fridge next week. Where a step matters, we say what it is doing.

And we cook the food we actually eat. There is jollof rice and suya here alongside buttermilk pancakes and a weeknight garlic pasta, because that is genuinely what the week looks like. We are not trying to cover every cuisine. We are trying to be reliable about the ones we know well.

Come and cook with us

Everything here has been made in an ordinary home kitchen with ordinary equipment, usually more than once. If something does not work for you, we would genuinely like to hear about it — that is how these recipes got better in the first place.

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