A year in meemalee's kitchen

My name is meemalee and I write about food.

That first part's a lie. "Meemalee" is just a nickname my best friend made up for me at uni. My real name is MiMi which virtually no-one can spell correctly (that's two big M's, thanks). I do, however, write about food.

I always wanted to be a writer. My mum still has a book in which I scrawled my first ever offering at the tender age of three. I'm reproducing it verbatim as a world exclusive:

"A long long time ago there was a man and a wooman. They went to Beflehem. A long long time ago."

At the age of five, I wrote a Blytonesque six-chapter extravaganza about a kindly grandfather, his adorable grandson and a magical rocking horse. I was meant to write about what I'd done that weekend.

At the age of eight, I typed up a sequel to the Ramona series by Beverly Cleary. I illustrated it and everything.

At the age of ten, I wrote a storybook called "Dragons in the House" for children (well, for children younger than me). It had a pop-up, firebreathing dragon and little envelopes just like Janet and Allan Ahlberg's The Jolly Postman.

At the age of 14, obsessed with PG Wodehouse, I entered a school contest with a short comic novella called "High Society" about a young toff seeking fame and fortune. I won.

And then, and then, I put away my childish things. Decided I had to be a grown-up. I stopped writing altogether.

I met my husband at university. He was a creative type - short stories were his forte. He got published in the May Anthologies. He was this close to winning a BBC writing competition. He wrote a proper novel. And I looked on, wistfully. My muse had long flown.

I kept myself entertained though. I took photos of everything, and especially of food. I even began to write a Burmese cookery book, figuring that no-one really knew anything about Burmese food in the West. I got a fair bit done, and then became demoralised and decided no-one would be interested, especially as, rather than concentrate on recipes, a lot of it descended into whimsical rambling.

And in the meantime, I'd read food blogs. Not the big, famous ones about restaurants I could never afford in places I would never go to and which were often incredibly earnest, worthy and self-important.

No, I liked the ones that managed to have a sense of humour, that were not afraid to poke fun at an establishment or at themselves, and were written by people who I thought I would get on with in real life. All of these blogs can be found on my blogroll.

By far my favourite blog was noodlepie, by a guy from Newcastle Rugby who lived in Vietnam and faithfully documented his eating experiences out there. Intelligently written, funny, so passionate about food it bordered on geekiness (though he denies it), this to me was exactly how a blog should be written.

But I'd never write a blog myself. I mean, who'd be interested?

The years went by. I watched a lot of telly. Food shows were my personal pr0n - Come Dine With Me, The Restaurant, Great British Menu, The Supersizers, god, even Eating with the Enemy. All grist to my TV-viewing mill.

And then there was MasterChef. How I love thee, MasterChef. In 2009, a loveable Kiwi guy called Mat Follas managed to reach the grand final and if I had been the gambling type, I'd have bet on him to win. And lo, he did.

And I jumped up and down on the sofa and I ranted to my husband about how great the final had been. And my husband gave me a look and said "Why don't you blog about it?"

And I looked back at him and said "Don't be silly". But then I thought about it for a while.

Finally, I realised that it didn't matter that I was no longer inspired to make up stories. Write what you know, they say. Well, I know about food.

And that was that.

It's now exactly a year to the day since my very first blog post on that MasterChef final (my blog's first anniversary) and there's been a few changes. I originally tried to write every other day, but that way madness lies. I used to catalogue every post with an R word at the start like "Review", "Rant", "Recipe" but decided that was just dumb. I even asked a few people for reciprocal blogroll links before realising that's a stupid, stupid, newbie faux pas (apologies to anyone I did this to).

The biggest change is that I bought my own domain name - I don't know if anyone noticed but you're now looking at http://www.meemalee.com/ rather than http://meemalee.blogspot.com. This in itself is tremendously exciting for a nerd like me.

I feel a bit more settled now. I'm still not sure who reads this blog apart from charitable friends and family and the odd fellow blogger - it delights me that anyone bothers at all, and the other day I was left speechless when I read this:

Yep, that's from noodlepie, my favourite blogger ever. My mind is truly boggled.

Soooo, I guess I'll keep writing for now. I'd quite like to be paid for it one day if poss, but at any rate I enjoy being rude about food. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as me.

And I'm still writing that Burmese cookbook.




(pic of me at top copyright Kavita Favelle, composite created with Photofunia)