So here's the plan: to cook through my entire cookbook library. Not every recipe - I couldn't do that in a hundred years - but a complete meal from each book. I know, I know...sounds an awful lot like Julie & Julia but I swear on, well, whatever you want that I had the idea before I'd ever heard of Julie. It came to me sometime last year as I was living in China and missing all the cookbooks I had in storage and the flexibility of walking into an American market and knowing every ingredient and what to do with. As I sat there that day I realized that I had literally dozens of cookbooks out of which I'd never cooked a single recipe, let alone a whole meal. While I confess I like to just read cookbooks, it seems sort of silly not to have at least made a meal from each. So that's what I'm going to do - a meal from each, in order (more or less). I'll try not to fall back on recipes I've done before (so for books I use a lot I've got try new things). I do, though, reserve the right to skip a book and come back later if, for example, the meal I want to make needs ingredients that are out of season. I also reserve the right to skip a few books with which I've already experimented enough to discover the food's no good (although I promise to write about them and why I choose not to cook from them). Finally, I reserve the right to combine recipes from several books for a single meal when it doesn't make sense to cook separate meals from each book (as, for example, with the cookbook which has only muffin recipes or the collection of several very small books on Hopi cookery).
The path should take us first on a tour of the world as we travel through the Time Life Foods of the World books. Then we'll come back to the American melting pot as we work through assorted American standards. We'll take a trip down memory lane as we recreate dishes from history. A second world tour will take us through many of the classics of ethnic cookery as well as miscellaneous books I've picked up on my travels. We'll conclude with meals assembled from books that focus on specific meals (e.g. afternoon tea) or categories of food (e.g. muffins).
I hope you'll come along for the ride.
The Zen of Sushi
14 years ago
