Greetings, reader. You’ve stumbled across The Blog: The blog that I’ve been threatening to begin for at least six months. Well done, you! Is it a big deal? Yes, yes it is. During the last decade, I’ve dodged my fair share of social media bullets whilst taking others square on the chest but I’ve always been perplexed as to why people take it so seriously, blogging included. Feeling somewhat less profoundly individual, I now find myself at the base of the blogcraft precipice and it looks as though the beginning of my first post is set to lay out my disdain for blogs, bloggers and the act of blogging, how bloody novel! What is it that compels us to write these lengthy posts – largely to people we don’t and will never know – on what are usually trifling matters? Is it an innate desire to have our opinions heard by the masses and that the internet has become a suitable stage on which we can all perform like circus clowns? Perhaps. Then there are those that seek to make their fortunes through blogging, the ‘self-hosters’ – those confident enough in themselves to pay the subscription fees associated with owning their domain. If they’re successful then kudos where kudos is due, but the sad fact is that the vast majority fall incredibly short and their dreams of a blog founded business evaporate as quickly as they were realised. For those that manage to sculpt their circus stage into a podium for blogging excellence, great fortune and the opportunity to throw away a conventional career await, and frankly, I’m terribly envious.

Does all of this make me an annoying, flaccid contrarian? Almost certainly, but I wanted to get the word flaccid in as soon as possible. In an act of entirely (un)forgivable hypocrisy, I seem to have seamlessly joined the legion of twits that reside in coffee shops hoping to pave the internet with try-hard profanity and attention seeking photography, and I couldn’t bear less shame if I tried. Anyway, please do read on, lest I never find my foothold in Blogdom.

I guess the reader – that’s you, chief – might like to know what my mission statement is and why I am in fact blogging when I could be criticising bloggers with my fellow misanthropists. The answer is simple, food; delicious, dribble inducing banquets; sapid, saliva inspiring feasts. You know of what I speak, those plates of consumables that make your salivary glands feel like Christmas has come early. Despite my envy of those that manage to monetise their blogging efforts, my aim is not to cash in; I’m dumping my culinary efforts into the .com æther in order to… Actually, I haven’t a clue why, but I am.

Over the last couple of years, at university – Master of Physics, if you really wanted to know – I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know a couple food savants. I won’t name them, their egos don’t require stoking, but by sitting back and watching this dynamic duo bicker in the kitchen I have learnt to be at least marginally irritable when cooking around others. I think I can now legitimately call myself a novice cook too. Two years of decidedly delicious company have now passed, graduation – which, for the record, really isn’t worth the hype it gets – is upon me and an abundance of time now lies ahead, until I have to do the whole ‘working for a living’ thing of course. So with fantasy of promoting myself beyond novice status, I head to the kitchen with laptop in tow.

It will soon become apparent that I spend a gloriously large fraction of my time orbiting meaty farmhouse grub, rarely gaining escape velocity to challenge anything that isn’t fleshcentric. “Salad?!” I hear the vegetarians, vegans and the other culinarily awkward cry. Rennet all over it. Thanks, Parmesan. It’s not that I mean to cause offense, but rather that I would like to build some realistic expectations of The Blog; there might be the odd meat free pasta dish, pudding or cocktail floating around but, in general, this is a meaty production.

My good friend Sabatier making short work of dear Buttercup. A delicious beef fillet for five.

My posts shall consist of what I eat, what makes me ‘mmmm’ and any other related musings I dare to have. If something is judged by the eaters to be particularly delicious, then recipes will be detailed. I will endeavour to make a post per day. Now, in the name of not dawdling like a two-wheeled Reliant Robin, let’s get on with it. Butter me up and call me a skillet, this is the porcine publication: The Porky Pantry.