I am not a trained chef.

Most of what I know about cooking came from spending copious amounts of time in the kitchen with my mother and grandmother as a child, mostly observing, asking questions, and occasionally getting in the way. Over the years, I picked up recipes from people I met while travelling, begged friends for family heirlooms, read far too many cookbooks, watched an unreasonable number of cooking videos, and researched the fuck out of things on ChatGPT.

I am still learning. I suspect I always will be. There are worse ways to spend your time.

About Authenticity

I have a slightly complicated relationship with the word authentic.

There is rarely one single, immutable formula for a dish. Most recipes have infinite versions, shaped by family traditions, geography, availability of ingredients, local tastes, religious and cultural practices, and the inevitable improvisations that happen when someone is standing in front of a stove and discovers that the one ingredient they absolutely need is sitting in a shop 12 kilometres away.

So when I cook a dish, I am less interested in finding the one supposedly sacred recipe and more interested in understanding why the dish became what it is.

A recipe carries a history. Trading routes determine which spices arrive in a kitchen. Geography determines what grows nearby. Poverty and abundance shape substitutions. Religion and culture influence what gets eaten and when. Cooking vessels, fuel, preservation techniques and even climate leave their fingerprints on food. Over generations, all of this gets distilled into technique, flavour and habit.

That, to me, is the soul of a recipe.

I'd rather understand that soul than pretend there is one sacrosanct way of making something. If your grandmother makes it differently, congratulations. You have a grandmother with a recipe.

About THC

Every recipe you find here has been cooked by me.

I've made it, tasted it, messed around with it, researched it, questioned it, and usually cooked it again. Sometimes I follow a traditional method closely. Sometimes I make an informed improvisation. Sometimes the improvisation works beautifully. Sometimes it becomes a very educational dinner.

THC, The Happy Chemist, is my attempt to demystify cooking.

There will be recipes, techniques, food history, ingredient deep-dives and the occasional rabbit hole that started with a very simple question and somehow ended three hours later with twelve browser tabs open and me wondering why I suddenly know the history of a spice I didn't even intend to use.

I don't claim to have the final word on any dish. Quite the opposite.

If you know a better way, have a family version, disagree with something I've written, or think I've got something spectacularly wrong, tell me. Corrections, suggestions, arguments and additions are always welcome.

The kitchen has never belonged to one person, one recipe or one definition of authenticity. It belongs to everyone who keeps cooking.

And if nothing else, I hope THC makes you a little more curious about what is happening in your pan.