Who is The Spoonie Foodie?

With my sister at her beautiful wedding, photo courtesy of Lisa Dawn photography (www.lisadawn.co.uk)

In short, me! I’m Charley - spoonie, (very) amateur photographer and food fanatic! This is a new blog for me, but for those that used to read Charley’s Kitchen, welcome back! After a (very long) break, I decided I wanted to start writing again, but this time I knew I needed a slightly different focus. So why the spoonie foodie? Well as you might have guessed, I identify myself as a spoonie*. That is, somebody with a chronic health condition or disability (although I am still very uncomfortable about calling myself disabled, but that’s a whole blog post of its own!) Anybody that knows me will know that I’ve always been unwell, but in August last year I finally got a diagnosis of a condition called Ehlers Danlos Sydrome. It is a genetic condition that affects the collagen and it is at the moment incurable. The main symptoms are loose joints, chronic pain and severe fatigue. I have been (significantly) unwell for over 10 years, but before this diagnosis I always had the hope that I was going to get better. This would be spurred on by the fact that it is a relapsing and remitting condition so there have been times where I have been at around 80% of a ‘normal’ person’s activity levels, as opposed to around 10-30% now. Learning I have EDS has put an end to that hope, and to be perfectly frank, this has been an extremely difficult fact to come to terms with and I am by no means at the end of that process. It doesn’t help that I have secondary diagnoses of ME, depression and anxiety; but come to terms with it I must. I can no longer make plans for ‘once I’m better’, if only because it is just too hard every time I come again to the realisation that that time will never be. And thus comes in The Spoonie Foodie. As you might have guessed, this is space for not just my culinary adventures (of which there will be plenty!) but also somewhere where I can put down my thoughts on living with disability, mental health and other issues I feel like writing about. So, that covers the spoonie bit, I guess I should also introduce myself as a ‘foodie’. Food has always been central to my life, some of my first memories are baking bread with my Gramps and fairy cakes with Grammy (I still use the same recipe to this day). I’ve grown up watching my mother whip up a feast in 10 minutes at the unexpected arrival of some friends or popping over to Grandma’s for a quick hello and being plied with (THE BEST!) chicken soup and kneidlach, or new green cucumbers and diet coke that she kept in the house especially for my sister and me. If you hadn’t already guessed I should probably tell you that we are Jewish. In practice this means that every event is marked and celebrated with food shared with family and friends, waking up to the smell of chicken soup at 7am on a Friday morning was a regular occurrence and I have never known our fridge not to be full to the brim. I was destined to be a foodie really, my mother now has two separate kitchens in her house and it’s only her and my dad! As soon as I moved out of home my social life revolved around evenings with wine and chats over a homemade dinner as opposed to getting wasted and going clubbing (that’s not to say we didn’t party, it’s just that I wasn’t someone that went clubbing every night or even every week. And anyway, I was always more inclined to go to house parties than the megaclubs in town). I bonded with people in one of the oldest ways possible, by “breaking bread” and sharing with them what I have. I love cooking itself - the visceral act of connecting with the food you are about to eat, preparing the ingredients before transforming them into something completely different. I love the science behind it all, how simple acts like kneading bread build up the gluten strands inside it which will then give the bread its structure, texture and taste. And yet despite the scientific nature of cooking there is SO much scope for creativity, gut feeling and instinct. I think you’ve probably got the idea now that I am a bit obsessed with food, so the blog is a place where I can document that obsession and make it feel maybe a teensy bit more productive! If you’ve made it this far I hope I haven’t bored you (!) and I really hope you enjoy reading my blog,

Charley x

*for information on The Spoon Theory please see http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/wpress/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory/ It is the most accurate and accessible portrayal I have ever found of what it is like to live with a chronic illness.