Hi, I’m Laurel Bailey and with my husband Rob (behind the camera, cracking wise) we are Real Food. We are fortunate enough to live on beautiful Bowen Island, just off the coast of Vancouver, Canada but I have lived In Hong Kong, Taiwan, London, Los Angeles and Kochi and have spent a good portion of my life travelling and learning about other cultures and their food. 

Food and travel are our loves and since the pandemic curtailed our wanderlust, we decided to use our food interest, knowledge and passion to share some simple recipes in the hopes of enticing people back into their kitchens to make real food from scratch. 

I have noticed that many of our sons’ friends don’t cook, think that they can’t afford to buy ingredients or, in some cases, don’t even know how to identify common ingredients or how to cook them. I thought that maybe we could help demystify the ingredients, the tools, the language and the techniques needed to make real food.

What is Real Food?

Many people – for many reasons – no longer cook their own food. If you’re not making your own food, you may not know what you are eating. It may not even be “food”, it may be what food writer Michael Pollan calls a “food-like substance”. I would like to see us return to eating REAL food. Food with ingredients that are minimally processed and as close to the original source as possible. 

I would like food made using techniques that most people can do at home without commercial machinery. I am concerned that the skills and language that are required to make real food are disappearing as more people opt for take-out and pre-made meals because they don’t think they have the time to cook. Parents who are too busy to teach their kids to cook, schools that are focusing on other skills and a general easy availability and variety of foods made and delivered by someone else are eroding our foodways. The farther we move away from growing, selecting and preparing our food, the more likely that we will eating meat from feedlots, fruits and vegetables grown out of season, picked unripe and shipped long distances; more likely that we are supporting horrible working conditions for people in other countries; more likely that we are eating cheap fillers and synthetic substitutes; more likely that we are eating unhealthy fats, sugars and excess sodium. We can change that. I would like your help.

Making Choices

I get that we are privileged to live where we do and have access to the kinds of ingredients we have but I also know that we have made, and continue to make, choices that you can too. Making the choice to make the time to cook and eat together. Making the choice to buy the best ingredients that we can within the budget we have. Making the choice to minimize waste by choosing to use what we have – ingredients and leftovers – instead of moving on to whatever else we might want to eat. You can start small. Make one choice – like choosing to buy dried beans instead of canned and cook up a batch once a week – and go from there. Maybe cook 2 meals a week if you ordinarily cook none. You can take 10 minutes away from scrolling on your phone (we all do it, that’s not a criticism!) to set your thrift-store slow cooker up to make something yummy for tomorrow before you go to bed. You can do this. I got you.