Gradely Scran

A long time ago, in 1998, when the internet was a much smaller and friendlier place than it is now, I bought a domain name (jill.com was a porn site, so I had to make do with jill.net) and set up my own website. I did a lot of cooking at the time, so that’s what I decided the website should be about. The graphics and code were painstakingly hand-crafted. It got quite a lot of visitors, for 1998. Then I got busy with real life, and jill.net went into decline.

Eighteen years later I decided it was time to dust it off. I got the old pages converted into WordPress blog posts, I added some pictures (it was considered rude to use too many photos back in 1998…) and here we are.

Back in 1998 I really enjoyed cooking. I had a decent income and no kids. I read recipe books, and spent as much time wandering around the food shops as I wanted.

Now, I don’t really enjoy it any more. I have three kids who are not really into vegetables, fish, meat, eggs, cheese, potatoes, herbs, spices or anything too tasty (unless it’s deep-fried). Food shopping is an expensive chore, to be completed as quickly as possible with the least damage to my purse. Cooking is a necessary evil, to be executed swiftly and substituted whenever possible with a takeaway pizza.

I’m hoping that reviving Jill’s Gradely Scran will revive my interest in cooking.

The recipes on this site constitute virtually my entire culinary repertoire. Some of them tend to get wheeled out every week, others once a year if you’re lucky. Every so often I’ll try something new. If it’s a success, it gets blogged, and if it isn’t, well, it doesn’t. So everything comes with my personal guarantee that I’ve tasted it at least once and thought it was OK.

And finally, a terminology note.

/ˈɡreɪdlɪ/

/skræn/