Well my bread starter is all ready now, and not wanting to waste any I used the throw off for making some lovely sourdough naan breads, which will make a great accompaniment for a vegetable curry I have just made up, that’s dinner sorted with enough naan breads to freeze for another day. Tomorrow I will start making some sourdough loaves, I want to plan to bake once or twice a week, so I can freeze a couple of loaves, I will take some photos when I get them out of the oven. Sourdough bread is an amazing product and you can make fabulous cheese on toast with it, great too used to top a home made French onion soup, it’s making me hungry just thinking about it.

I don’t know why I am so fearful and panicky about leaving the house or going away, and trying something new to do? why do I have to have a meltdown about these things? When I think back to how I was running busy kitchens, I could run extensive menus sometimes even on my own and most of the time with just my wife and I. At one particular restaurant I had an a’la carter menu with 36 main course dishes on it, plus starters and deserts and a daily menu with about 20 dishes of the day, freshly caught fish etc…and all cooked to order, I particularly excelled at fish, but I was just as enthusiastic about any of the kitchen sections, and had a good reputation in south Devon and was head hunted by many a restaurant/hotel. I could walk in and take over any struggling kitchen and turn it around, and I sometimes long for that life still, I was good a what I did – but now I am a shadow of that person, and I want my old self back, even a bit of the old me would be an immense difference.

Though I enjoyed all the sections of the kitchen, my biggest love would have to be buffet work, there is nothing more frilling than preparing a buffet and receiving the praise as the customers ask how you managed to prepare such masterpieces.

My early memories of buffet work was watching my father preparing dishes for the gastronomic festival in south Devon, at a place called the Marine spare in the late 1960s I think it was then that I really decided that I wanted to be a chef. My father always entered the fish section with salmon garnished with truffles and set in aspic jelly, but It was when he developed a pastry that you could use for sculpture work that he became well known for, appearing in the local papers with a large article “a working chef at Christmas” also westward TV did a program on him and his pastry work. Yes my father was a great inspiration to me!