The site I wish existed when I started cooking.

I'm Elliott. This is my site.

📷 Action shot — you cooking

I taught myself to cook properly over the last five years, by paying attention to what works and what doesn't, and by caring about getting it right. This site is the result. It's the recipes and the techniques I use, written the way I wish recipes had been written when I started.

The thing I've always struggled with is finding recipes I can trust. Most sites and books just throw things together — mass produced, untested, written to fill a page. The recipes on this site are different. Every one is developed, cooked, tweaked, and re-cooked by me until it meets my standards. My family never understand why I'm not happy with a meal I've cooked for them — they see nothing wrong with it, and I see meat a few degrees over, sauce slightly overseasoned and potatoes not quite crispy enough. I take notes and fix it the next time. I'm a perfectionist when it comes to food, and nothing makes it onto this site until it's been done properly. No corners cut. No rushed recipes. If it's not the right way of doing things, it doesn't go on the site.

The other thing I've never enjoyed about cooking is the planning and the shopping. Working out what to make, building a list, picking the right quantities for the number of people I'm feeding. That bit kills the joy for a lot of people, and it used to kill it for me. So I built the rest of the site around fixing that — a meal planner, a smart shopping list, recipes that scale to any number of people. The cooking I love. The planning I want to disappear.

Why technique matters

The thing about cooking is that almost every dish comes down to a handful of techniques. Heat control. Salt. Acid. Resting. Timing. Get those right and everything else follows. Get them wrong and the best ingredients in the world won't save you.

That's what this site is built around. Recipes that teach the techniques as much as the dishes. So you don't just make one good carbonara, you understand why it's good, and the next ten you cook are better.

How I cook

For me cooking has gone from something I had to do to something I genuinely look forward to every day. I'll be outside in the freezing cold in January cooking something on charcoal that would have been easier indoors, because the result is better and I love doing it.

I cook on pretty much anything. A pan on the hob, an oven, a wok, a flat top, charcoal, a pizza oven. The pizza oven and charcoal get used all year round, sometimes when there's snow on the ground. There's something about cooking with fire that feels different to anything else, and once you've started chasing that you don't really stop.

The strange thing about getting good at cooking is that most restaurants start to feel pretty average. Not the great ones, those still humble you, but the everyday places. You realise you can cook better at home because you take more time, you use better ingredients, and you actually care about getting it right. That's the level you can reach with this site. Not because the recipes are clever, but because they're properly explained, and because cooking properly at home, slowly, gives you an advantage no kitchen serving fifty covers ever has.

Cooking brings people together

The other thing about cooking properly is what it does for the people around the table. A meal someone has put real thought into is one of the most generous things you can offer, and it's one of the only things in modern life that reliably gets people to put their phones down and actually be present.

Friends round on a Saturday. Family on a Sunday. A weeknight dinner with the people you live with. The cooking is half the point — the rest is what happens once it's on the table. That's really why I keep doing it. The food matters, but the moments around it matter more.

📷 People around a table

What this site isn't

It isn't a content farm. There's no autobiography before the ingredients. No fifteen photos of the same dish at different stages. No pop-ups asking for your email before you've read a sentence. No ads cluttering up the screen and slowing everything down.

Cooked Properly is a site that respects your time. The recipe loads, the technique is explained, and if something might go wrong, the recipe tells you what to look for and how to fix it. That's the whole philosophy.

Have a look around. Make something. Tell me what you think — I'd love to hear from you.

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