The Day Our Kitchen Took Over Our Lives

The chaos that started it all

It started with a single wooden spoon and way too much enthusiasm.

Picture this: our tiny Cornish kitchen, barely big enough for two people, with every surface covered in bubbling pots, sticky spoons and mason jars in various stages of being filled. The smell of caramelising onions mixed with the sharp tang of vinegar and somewhere in the chaos, Ryan was frantically scribbling notes on a piece of paper already stained with fig juice.

"What if we add more balsamic?" I called out, stirring what would eventually become our Fig, Caramelised Red Onion & Balsamic Chutney.

"The last batch was perfect!" Ryan shouted back, elbow-deep in chopping apples for what was destined to be batch number twelve of our Apple & Scrumpy Chutney.

That was three years ago and honestly, we haven't stopped since.

From hobby to obsession

We never set out to start a business. We were just two food lovers who got fed up with bland supermarket preserves that tasted like they'd been made in a laboratory rather than a kitchen. Every Sunday, we'd find ourselves experimenting – a pinch of this, a splash of that, tasting everything with the kind of intensity usually reserved for wine critics.

When friends became customers

Our friends became unwilling taste testers. "Try this," became our most-used phrase at dinner parties. Soon, they were leaving with armfuls of jars and we were fielding texts like "Can you make more of that spicy one?" and "My mum wants to know your chutney recipe."

The turning point came when our friend Sarah served our Chilli Jam at her book club. Within a week, we had twelve orders from complete strangers.

That's when we looked at each other across our jam-splattered kitchen and thought: maybe this obsession of ours could actually help other people fall in love with bold flavours too.

Still the same passion, bigger kitchen

Three years on, our kitchen is still the heart of everything we do. It's bigger now (thank goodness), but every jar still gets the same attention, the same wooden spoon treatment, the same taste-testing ritual that started it all.

Because at the end of the day, we're still just two food lovers who believe that life's too short for bland preserves.

What's bubbling in your kitchen? We'd love to hear about your own flavour experiments in the comments below.