About me

Hi, I’m Zoë (see mug, right). I’ve recently moved to Nassau in the Bahamas and Rum & Reason is my kitchen blog, where I write about the food I cook and eat. My other internet stuff can be found at zoejessica.com.

I love to cook and I have a fairly eclectic repertoire – I adore good old-fashioned rib-sticking English food, but my mum’s talents for cooking Provencal and Indian dishes are also a big influence. Now, after a few years spent in Milan, I’ve added an obsession with Italian cooking – the simplicity of flavours and focus on vegetables are just perfect for my tastes. I do know that as an English girl I’ll never attain the innate sensibility for food that all Italians seem to get in their birthday welcome pack, but luckily I have Mr. R&R at home, a bona fide Piemontese, as official arbiter of Italianicity. My other great gastronomic joy is baking – I think the weighing, measuring, whisking and kneading release just as many endorphins as a long run and although I try to balance both I think baking is slowly tipping the calorie seesaw…

Here you’ll find the recipes that I cook at home for myself and a discerning audience of one – I adapt a lot of recipes both for quantities and for my tastes. There’s just the two of us at home and I do try not to cook huge portions – we’re not very good at leaving leftovers and in any case I like having an excuse to try new things. So pretty much all the recipes here will be for two hungry people or things that are easily portioned for freezing. As far as ingredients go, the hot climate here makes it easy to eat vegetables and fruit at every meal and not have too much stodge (also because entirely brown food makes me somewhat anxious). I’m not militant but prefer olive oil rather than butter, steaming to frying, one fresh flavour rather than six. So normal home meals for us are lettuce-free salads with wholegrains, vegetables to accompany simply cooked meats as well as pastas and risottos. Of course all this healthiness gets balanced out by vats of homemade ice-cream and rainy day puddings. Luckily it rains quite a lot here.

Zoë x

p.s. A disclosure: at the moment, not all the photos are mine on the blog – some come from istockphoto.com, as a combination of bad light, technology malfunction or just overwhelming hunger means that the meals can’t be captured as cooked. Where photos are not mine, I note this in the “alt” text for the image.