Like many people, I have always doodled. Whether in the margin of the page I am working on or on a scrap of paper nearby, I am almost always scribbling. Mostly these doodles were mindless (not to be confused with mindfulness) with no particular theme, rhyme or reason. However, over the years, and by accident, I have concentrated a bit more to elevate these shabby grotesques into recognisable images with a purpose rather than just a distraction.

When I started cooking professionally, I started keeping notebooks to act as an aide-mémoire for ideas, perhaps just a combination of ingredients to be experimented with in the future or definite recipes that had been tried and tested and then sometimes little illustrations to memorise a particular presentation. Occasionally I coloured in the drawings, though this was not the norm. This was a time before we had camera phones at our disposal to record every possible image we might or might not need to refer to in the future. There are zillions of those pictures in my phone and allegedly they are also safe in some cloud or other, but that is a concept I don’t in any way understand.

I still use a notebook on a daily basis, mostly for the compilation of lists. I think I always will, but now my little drawings are done on my phone or tablet. I discovered this possibility when adding to a smartphone note one day. I decided to press the little pencil emoji and lo and behold, a new world of sketching possibilities opened up to me. Using my finger, I was able to mark down crude sketches that to a greater or lesser extent reflected what I was trying to record.

I started to get more interested in the possibility of the images when I found that some of them had personality and as much impact as the written word, and in some cases actually made a much stronger point. If in a recipe I am suggesting that the cook should stir vigorously, curiously, a simple sketch of just that seems to jump off the page rather than perhaps being skipped over and not taken seriously in the reading of the text. What fascinates me, though, is how some emotion seems to be transferred from my finger, through the device and into the image. It allows me to transfer some of the pleasure and the sheer joy I get from cooking, teaching and feeding people onto a page that I could never do with the manual use of pen, pencil, paint or paper. I find it fascinating that somehow a crude and rather ham-fisted sketch of an old-fashioned grater as suggested as the better tool to grate Parmesan cheese can be impactful.

In any event, these images are not the result of years spent mastering the art of drawing. I have not pursued the challenging path of the artist who spends countless hours, days, months and years honing an ancient craft. I have no illusions about my skill in this métier. Drawing is not my craft. These expressions are a conflux of passion, technology and a single digit and their purpose is to explain some of my craft or my love for my craft: cooking. If they please or ring a visual bell, that’s great. If not, well, that’s okay too.

The Joy of Food: A Celebration of Good Things to Eat, by Rory O’Connell, Gill Books, €24.99, is out now.