How it began.

Just over a month ago I came home from university, penniless and jobless, to live with my parents. Two weeks ago I started, with the backing of my exasperated mother, the Food Revolution. Food has always been an integral - but strictly monitored - part of our lives. We - my parents, sister and I - eat as many meals together as possible and we all love food. My mother is an amazing cook and, since he retired seven years ago, my father has also done a lot of the day-to-day cooking.

My mother has several fatal food allergies and carries an epipen. My sister has a wheat intolerance - although she occasionally succumbs and eats a doughnut! - and my father is a whole other kettle of fish. I should preface by saying that I love him dearly and - in some aspects - he is ill. Unfortunately the list of food he believes himself intolerant/allergic (he uses these interchangeably) to grows and changes every year. Some of these banned substances do not produce a reaction from him if my desperate mother introduces them illicitly into the food and, when it comes to food he loves, he will blithely eat ingredients that he refuses on any other occasion.

The point at which I lost patience came when he declared he was allergic to bananas, a fruit that has put my mother into intensive care twice, which he has been eating with gusto for over fifty years. I was fed up of eating plain potatoes, plain carrots and a meat item (no seasoning, usually grilled). Given my unemployment and multitude of recipe books and a desire to actually taste something I put it to my mother that I could do what she, with her full-time job, can not - cook two menus.

This blog will document my attempts at providing meals for my father that subscribe to every single one of his food requests - sometimes adapting our recipes and sometimes sticking to cooking a separate meal. I have no real aim in mind but I think it will be a useful exercise to record and it would be good to have a record of recipes he'll actually eat.