When I started cooking it took quite some time to really work out the best approach. It turned out managing the kitchen side of things, not just the food, was key to the whole process. When I finally dropped the dollar on proper knives it was a bit of a revelation. With practice comes proficiency of course, and within that speed and flavour increases. If you’re talking about cooking. If you’re talking about games your stats increase in other things – HP, mana, you name it. You get better wielding your chosen item, be it magic staff or fancy cooking knife. Quite some time ago I decided it’d be fun to mash these two things – cooking and gaming – together. Not in the Cooking Mama kind of way, but in a cookbook. Over the years we’ve collected a range of recipes (as you do) and over that time I’ve been forming them into a manuscript for a book. While I’d been slowly pulling ideas together, I hadn’t had the time to really focus on it as a project. Fortunately I’ve saved up enough leave to take three weeks off work to really get into it.

Art was always going to be the major component to this project. Unfortunately I can’t draw. But my brother can and I’ve commissioned him to do the illustrations. What we’ve arrived at, I’m very happy with. In this case the fraternal connection is making things easy. Because of our shared history it’s easy to relate to some fairly obscure themes that we’ve come across in games before. That’s why you’ll enjoy the detail of the drawings and may find them strangely familiar – they call on about 25 years of gaming experience.

It’s all well and good to decide to publish a book. After that point things get pretty challenging. But I’m enjoying the challenge. Over the coming months most likely, I’ll post updates that relate to this project.