About

Last updated August 28th, 2016

This site started as just a simple website set up to test some web optimisation tools in 2005. The site had 5 recipes and only one produced something edible. I didn’t really cook much at the time. I called the site twimii, the way I make it is, and then, because of some issue with domain names, twimmi, the way I make mine is.

Sometime after – I think in 2006 – I found out I had high cholesterol and I managed, without too much effort, to reduce it to an acceptable level through exercise and diet alone. And once I had managed that I actually went back to my old diet of junk food combined with little to no exercise. I decided sometime after that to do a complete detox and, in order to force myself to stick with it, I published the stages of the diet and recipes on twimii.com. It was a very strict detox and I was forced to think about how to combine the limited foods I had to get whatever I was craving at the time.

I’m glad I did it, partly because I found I enjoyed blogging but also because I learned how to cook – well maybe that’s overstating my abilities in the kitchen – I learned how to cook some basic meals and I discovered how much I enjoyed cooking. I wouldn’t recommend the diet. It’s too difficult to stick to long term – and I like a much less strict diet.

If you want to get healthy and lose weight then exercise more, stop eating junk food and eat only 3 meals a day. Eat less and exercise more. That’s it. If this doesn’t work for you, you probably have some medical condition you’re not aware of… Anyone telling you something else is either deluded or trying to sell you something.

I didn’t renew the hosting for the website when the diet ended as I no longer needed it for testing. But then a year or two later I set it up again. Mostly because I liked the name a lot. I had begun to think of twimii as a sort of little cartoon character … unfortunately I can’t draw for love or money. But that didn’t stop me from creating a few toons – it did stop me from continuing it though because they always took hours to do. I need to somehow learn to draw.

Between 2011 and 2013 I added a bunch of recipes to the site and then while trying to make a couple of the recipes again I discovered that at least a couple were not quite right. I was so annoyed with myself. So when I redesigned the site in 2014 I dumped all the old recipes into pdfs and put them on a page titled The Old (and often inaccurate) Recipes of twimii’s Past.

I wanted to create a food blog that had appetizing pics of the food alongside accurate and easy to follow recipes. I was worried that twimii was past the point of rescue as far as being a recipe blog was concerned because I had a terrible habit of working on a recipe, finally getting it just-so (how I like it) and then just enjoying the meal, forgetting to record the recipe straightaway and so by the time I sat down to put it to paper I’d actually have forgotten half of it. Very annoying. So I set up a new food blog and started a new routine to ensure this didn’t happen anymore; I wrote up the recipe before I tried to make it and then adjusted it as I went about making it just-so. I know, it’s so simple. And yet I had been food blogging a few years before it occurred to me to do it this way…

So I didn’t add many recipes to the blog in 2014/15. Instead I started playing around in Photoshop a bit more and created different headers for twimii each month using shots from films and pasting the twimii gang into them. I really enjoyed doing that – and the way that all got started was actually because of an odd film called The Purple Taxi.

old twimii header menu
Just in case you’re wondering where the gang came from – this was once the top menu on the site.

This year, 2016, I decided to rewrite and old movie called The Fountainhead – because I didn’t like its message and also because I wanted to use this as the basis for the header images (I was using the Arcade Basic theme since The Purple Taxi). Looking up images of 1930s and 1940s movie stars each month … well, it’s really nice way to spend a day.

I also started adding more recipes to twimii this year. They are recipes from cookbooks I have – it seemed the only way to bring the food blogging side of twimii back from the brink. The renewal date for the other food blog is looming and I am going to renew it but I’ve decided to start to add those recipes here also. One blog is enough really.

twimii header
At the time of updating this page this is the current header on twimii. Very ’50s sci-fi horror, don’t you think?

I took down the header. It’s a little too ’50s sci-fi horror for a food blog really.

So if you’ve wandered onto twimii and you are wondering “What is this site? Is it a joke? Is it deranged?” It’s a food blog. A rather confused food blog. With some badly drawn toons. And some photoshopped cinematic scenes. And some musings and mental meanderings. But mostly, it’s a food blog. And no matter what other sort of content I add to it, for me it’s how I learned to cook and enjoy healthier food so – it’s a food blog.

But however how you classify it I hope you enjoy what you find here and thanks for reading.