Meet Me (the Toad)

I’m a 34-year old college teacher called Janne, and I’ve a confession: until recently, I couldn’t cook. At all. In fact, any operations launched by me in the general direction of the kitchen would almost certainly have led to the kind of outcomes where hunger is vastly preferable to risking an outbreak of food poisoning, even if you’re like my wife, whose feeding habits resemble small babies in their punctuality. We lived on processed tat, and had the double- and treble-chins to show for it.

Cooking in the hole!

Now, with just a little bit of time and practice, and absolutely no industry training whatsoever, not only can I cook (to an extent), I also enjoy sweating in front of the stove to the point where I insist on making something fresh from scratch every day of the week. I know what anyone familiar with credibility-stretching TV cooking shows is thinking: that’s easy if you’ve hours to spare in the kitchen, can afford ingredients from the outer reaches of luxury, and have facilities that could easily step in for a professional standard kitchen. But that’s not what Toad in the Hole’s about. This is cooking in the real world, where days are hectic, money is increasingly tight, and kitchens can be the size of postage stamp (in fact, that’d be considered a compliment by our miniscule cooking corner, or hole).

Toad in the Hole is not about showing off technical excellence. Neither is it about daring culinary stunts or costly obsessions. The point is simple: as declared by the mighty chef Gusteau in Pixar’s rodent-in-the-kitchen masterpiece Ratatouille, anyone can – and should – cook, and no matter how terrible you used to be in the kitchen, there is hope for everyone. After all, if I can do it…