About Me!

Hi There!, I'm Amanda Rain. Just a girl from Australia, I'm not really famous but my spaghetti sauce is. I am not a professional cook, my only real experience is if you can't cook well your going to bloody starve aren't you ?,I moved out of home when I was 14, well  I was booted out actually, got a job and have been surviving ever since , My background, well has nothing to do with food I am a photographer well that isn't really a job either more like a 40 year old hobby, though I do sell my work online and I started designing and taught myself the computer and doing graphics for t-shirts and the whole shebang of the web world.  It has taken me 8 years to learn what I know today, oh what the hell I am 51 and have done just about everything work wise, retail, hospitality pretty much you name it I have do it, I feel like an old dinosaur haha.

Anyway you probably want to know why I am writing this blog, to be honest my girlfriends on facebook kept telling me to do it because I was always posting my food pics on there when I couldn't go and shoot sunsets and I got bored not having anything to photograph, so here I am. And I have been saying to myself for years that I would do all my recipes or write them out, well this is as good a place to put them I guess.  Well I do love cooking, I get a kick out of people liking my food, I like to know my friends have full bellies when they leave me after a visit. It is the way I show people how much I love them, now this could be because I am a Cancer babe or it could be the Italian coming out in me. either way when I cook for other people more love goes into my food than when I am just cooking for myself and I think that is why it tastes better.

I love Italian food, I had lots of Italian and Greek friends growing up and learned bits and pieces off my friends mothers, but I worked night shift most of my adult life and rarely cooked, and ate at restaurants 4 nights a week. My cooking skills didn't really start to kick in until these past few years, cooking was just something you had to do right? . well the foodies wouldn't agree with that of course !. But I like good food who doesn't.

So here is my humble little blog of food, and of course you will find the links to my website, web store, gallery and online stores, there is so much to see and check out and I hope you love it ...Oh and here is the real kick, I am poor, you would not believe how poor I actually am I swear so cooking with barely anything in the pantry at times has become a skill in itself ,but here is the kick. I do not have an oven to cook in, yep no oven, I have some kitchen gadgets and a little hand held breville mixer that is what, hell, it was given to me when I was 16, about 35 years old. haha. I cook just about everything in my little bench top oven that is 15 years old, and I have one burner on the old gas stove that actually works.

here's a picture of what my bench top oven looks like only this is the new model, which I can't afford to get, but it will give you an idea of how hard it is to cook with just that. Hey they do a brilliant job don't get me wrong, but try cooking a tray of lasagne or a tray of scones in it. It is like trying to put a square peg into a round hole, It ain't happening. see what I mean . so I have had to adapt to the way I cook etc etc.