Once upon a time, I used to take a lot of photographs. I mean a lot a lot of photographs. This was the late noughties, a window of transition from film photography to mobile phone photography when the DSLR (digital single-lens reflex camera) was considered by most folks to be the best way to capture an image for posterity. This transition turned out to be a short-lived era but one long enough for me to learn how to shoot pretty well with a DSLR and start building a career as a freelance writer and photographer. That career lasted for about 15 years.
Back then, I bounced around to all sorts of events across London with a camera slung round my neck almost like a fashion statement. One of those events was a cook-off competition for charity called NomNomNom.
Set up by Mecca Ibrahim in 2008 (a couple of years after Twitter was founded and before Instagram even existed) and hosted at Cookery School at Little Portland Street, NomNomNom brought together a new community of food bloggers, London tech bloggers, fledging cooks, drinks writers and more to compete against each other in a “bloggers version of MasterChef (but shopping sustainably)” to raise money for Action Against Hunger.
I competed in the first Nom and then acted as ‘official’ photographer after that. I think the competitions ran until 2012 (I might be wrong). I know I didn’t attend every single Nom, but I did participate in most of them.
And I had a blast! It was fun and created out of a spirit of kindness – it was also delicious. I ate well and gleaned some valuable cooking wisdom as I zipped about snapping shots of all the cooks and judges in action.
Earlier this month, Mecca and Cookery School invited some of us original participants to a NomNomNom reunion. Maybe about a dozen of us were able to attend. I am so glad I was one of them. We cooked a feast: Israeli salad; muhummara; taramasalata; roasted butternut squash; roasted cauliflower and hazelnut salad; yoghurt, cucumber and rose petal dip; lamb kofta with tahini sauce; ample stacks of pitta to go with all those savouries plus semolina cake and baklava for dessert.
Along with another original participant (James Whatley aka Whatley Dude), I focused on making the kofta. Yum! And wow! I was impressed how tasty and juicy our meaty morsels were. I also was happy to discover how easy it would be for me to do this on my own at home.
Delectable doings aside, it was just really nice to catch up with folks from Before TImes – and to do so at Cookery School. Expert guidance from founder Rosalind Rathouse and her amazing team of kitchen pros (plus all the space and cool utensils, tools and gadgets) made the experience easy. They even cleaned up after us! Whatever your cooking skill level might be, Cookery School is an ideal setting for learning about food while having fun making and eating it!
These days, everybody’s a photographer with practically all of us toting around an incredibly versatile camera in our pockets. With the ubiquity of mobile phones and the instant gratification of uploading our images to Instagram and other social media, the world is a much different place than it was in 2008. I enjoyed the opportunity to take a foodie stroll down memory lane and fondly reconnect to how things used to be.
Cookery School at Little Portland Street is located at 15b Little Portland Street, W1W 8BW. Find out more at cookeryschool.co.uk.
