Hi! I’m Julian. Having grown up in central Europe, I only knew local food throughout my adolescence. While I still like it alright, my enthusiasm for home cooking wasn’t awakened until 2009, when I first delved into Chinese cuisine. My favorite and most practiced recipes nowadays come from Japan, Korea, Vietnam, China, and Thailand, but I like (and will attempt to cook) almost any dish from around the world. I travel regularly, and whenever I do, I try to find a local cooking class to participate in.
Why blog about it?
This whole blog thing started as a way for me to document and improve my own collection of recipes. I used to have a Word document, an Excel table, and other solutions that didn’t quite cut it. Moving to a private WordPress site finally allowed me to tag, order, filter and search recipes to my heart’s content, even on the go. The site was password-protected at the time, and never meant to be shared with anyone.
At one point, however, I recommended a recipe to someone and kept going on and on about tweaks I had made to it when I realized I could just give them the link and password to my own recipe. That’s what I did, again and again, until I began considering the launch of a public blog. It made sense – besides cooking, I already had some experience in photography, writing, and marketing.
Why is it all so… neon?
The futuristic cyberpunk spin originally came up as a branding idea with the aim of setting my blog apart. It was a natural choice for me as a long-time fan of this aesthetic, a developer of sci-fi video games, and enjoyer of tech wear and colorful LED lights in my home. Plus, I agree with a lot of the themes and messaging in Cyberpunk stories. I had this idea of an underground kitchen feeding the resistance, which is where the name originated. And if the ingredients ever become unaffordable, you know who we need to eat.
The real hideout is just a photo set in my room, carried by moody lighting and a fog machine. I painted a table black, put up some wallpaper around it, and plastered everything with neon-themed stickers. With that (plus an ever-expanding array of kitchenware), I started documenting my recipes anew, in a more professional-looking manner. I draw them all from the backlog of my original private blog, where hundreds more are still waiting at the time of writing.
Are the recipes any good?
All the food you see on this blog consists 100% of my actual weekend dinners, no trickery or fakery involved to make the dishes look better for the camera. I take an honest approach to every facet of my recipes. For example, you will find that the cooking times indicated actually reflect the reality of the average home cook. I also refrain from hiding steps in the ingredients, e.g. by listing “garlic, finely chopped”, in a bid to make the recipe look easier or shorter.
All the recipes I cook have gone through multiple iterations before they are even considered for the hideout collection. Anything that makes it here is a refined version of a personal favorite – I cook and weed out many more dishes along the way. This process makes it almost impossible to quickly hop on trendy social media fads, and that’s okay. If a rare trend-inspired dish stands the test of time, you will find it here eventually.
Hope you enjoy the food. Please leave ratings and comments to share your opinions. I post a new recipe every week; follow me on the channels linked in the header if you don’t want to miss out. Thank you for visiting!
Julian
