About Recipes Reimagined

Hi - I’m Harry, welcome to Recipes Reimagined. 

My earliest memory is cooking (not a surprise to people who have spent more than five minutes with me). My mum and I were making Christmas cake. She spent most of the time carefully measuring, stirring, working away. I spent most of the time leaving dough soaked handprints on every surface within toddling distance.

Whilst I didn’t receive any nominations for the Sous Chef of the Year Award that year, I did notice a magic in cooking. An alchemy in taking bowls of ‘stuff’ - nuts, flour, sugar - and transforming them into this beautifully unrecognisable, glossy fruitcake. It was a bunny out of the hat moment.

My cooking has refined ‘slightly' since then. I also tend to leave bigger handprints on the kitchen surfaces. But the belief remains: with the right imagination behind a recipe, it carries a magic. A warm stew has an ability to lift the worst winter’s commute; fish fingers, chips and peas can evoke childhood memories as if you were still in school uniform; and there’s still that nervous-excitement carrying those extra special date night recipes to the table.

The old mantra of what guys think about every five seconds should, for me, be about recipes. I have an involuntary kind of ‘mind-kitchen’: handfuls of recipes stowed away in pantry in my head. I’ll be in the middle of doing something…cycling, chatting, trying to sleep… and one will, completely at random, get brought out, at which point my mind starts firing up with adjustments; altering ingredients, cooking methods, textures, flavour pairings, plate positioning. Pulling ideas from what I read that morning, or a conversation overheard a week ago. It all gets chucked in, and I can honestly see and taste the outcome without it being cooked. Eventually, after this has happened enough times, it’s time to make it, refine it a bit more, photograph it, and get it on here.

That’s what I hope you find on this site: recipes which excite you enough that you want to cook them, and ideas which stimulate your imagination enough that you start thinking about food in a new way.