RecipePorn: Don't just eat the food, read about it

Some of my recipe books

I'm going to get my bitching out of the way now. Then I can carry on as the enthusiastic, heart-warming and hil-ar-ious food blogger you all want to follow, treasure, and add to your Favourites tab, instead of the reluctant hack who would rather be known as a "writer", moaning about not quite getting what she wanted.

What I wanted was a blog called FoodPorn. I am equal parts gourmet, gourmand and lush, but as a single girl with a flatmate who doesn't really do food, making proper meals is not an everyday occurrence.

Dinner parties have taken place in my flat, but it's always awkward telling a grown man he has to sit on a stool and eat his tagine from a side plate of my grandmother's flowery Royal Cauldon china, with a plastic spoon.

I wanted to write about food but figured if I just wrote about the food I had cooked, my blog posts would be few and far between.

For example, on Sunday I roasted a chicken which I served (to myself, in front of the tv) with leeks and buttery mash. But that's not exactly cooking. That's preparing food.

Before that...I do remember making some damn good banana and sunflower seed muffins a few weeks back. But the recipe made 24 instead of the stated 12, so I ended up eating about 15 of them myself. Disaster.

Before that it would have been late November, in my mum's amaaaaaaaazing new kitchen (more on this later).

Oh no. Tell a lie. I did cook my first ever Christmas dinner in 2009. In the sweltering mosquito- heavy heat of Buenos Aires. For fifteen Jews. More of that later too.

Hence deciding to write about food porn, or cookery books. Because I read recipes and plan meals as if I am actually going to cook them. As if I have a family of six to feed, or host salons in my (quite lovely) little flat every other evening. As if I have a gang of friends who stop by on their way home from work to sample my latest creations. I have friends, but not gangs of them. I hate gangs.

Food porn was the obvious name for my blog. That's what I call it when I go to bed with a cookbook or spend an evening reading one on the sofa. As in: "Just off for a bit of food porn dear." But someone had already nicked the blog name FoodPorn. Ditto FoodiePorn. And neither of them are still posting, which irks me.

I cast around in my head for clever alternatives, failed and hit the thesaurus. Among the offerings were "bite", "eat" and "slop". All of which, when combined with the word "porn", would definitely attract the wrong type of reader to my blog. I was almost taken with "snack", but this blog is not just about snacking. I'm a good snacker, certainly a proficient one, but I don't let snacking get in the way of real food. Glorious full breakfasts, long, lazy, multi-course meals with proper puddings etc etc.

So RecipePorn it is. I'll post about what I've been reading, because good food writers are a blessing and a joy and much else besides. The plan is to read and review new books and return to old favourites. I'll also share good food scenes from other books. And I'll post about the fantasy meals I am never likely to cook, as well as a few I do. I'll boast about any good stuff I've chomped outside of the house, providing I can attach it to something written - no doubt a restaurant review. And I'll write about food media: the good, the bad and the downright unpalatable. I've recently become quite a fan of scanning recipes to mail to friends, so I'll do a bit of that too. Not sure of any potential copyright issues there, but sure I'll find out soon enough. And lots of photos: unless your powers of visualization are tiptop, images are a must when it comes to recipe porn...