When I think of my Granny’s solitary little 1950s Good Housekeeping cookery book, well-thumbed, annotated, and generally well-used I feel slightly ashamed of my groaning bookshelves which contain more recipes than one domestic cook would ever need…but in my defence there was a lot less choice back then, you couldn’t just nip out and pick up sumac or ras-al-hanout whenever you fancied something a little more exotic – and how many recipes do you actually need for ‘food’-in-aspic or mock-cream?
I love cooking and generally do manage to include at least one new recipe a week, but since my weekly menus and shopping list are thrown together, rather haphazardly, in my lunchtimes at work I don’t have access to my rather vast library of tomes. Therefore I find myself searching the same websites (thank you BBC Good Food) and coming up with variations on a theme, week-in and week-out. Recently though, watching Yotam Ottolenghi’s Mediterranean Feasts inspired me to delve back into my cookbooks (perhaps helped over Christmas by receiving the full complement of his oeuvre). I got excited by all the fresh looking dishes and all the exciting flavours that I could almost taste, now don’t get me wrong I throw some form of chilli (fresh, crushed flakes, dried, powder) into 90% of my dishes as I like a bit of a buzz, but that’s not always enough – they’re still the same insipid dishes.
My mission for 2013 then is fairly clear; I have to cook at least one new dish a week from my very own cache of cookbooks – then at the end of the year I have to be brutal and discard those that did not make the cut. Although I have been as good as my word, better in fact as I think I’ve managed about 12 new recipes in the first 6 weeks, I’ve not committed anything to paper and now we’re into February (how did that happen?) – So I’ll write a retrospective piece for those recipes and then continue to document my progress throughout the year. Sorted!
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