The Project, Day 1: What is the cookbook project?

I hate cooking blogs. But I love cookbooks. Love buying them, and looking at them, and then wondering if I made a mistake buying them because all the recipes seem really hard or confusing, or require a bunch of ingredients or equipment I don’t have or don’t know how to get or can’t afford. Or are those beautiful cookbooks you see that are for professional kitchens, and every ingredient needed to be prepped days or weeks or months in advance and it’s all just so extensive that I don’t know where to start.

So I get these books, and then don’t do nearly enough to use them, spend hours looking at recipes, pull out a big stack on a rainy day, get overwhelmed by choice, wait too long to go to the store, and then just cop out and find something on The NYT cooking app that uses some pantry items I already have (and read the just—chef’s kiss, no notes—comments).

But I have all of these amazing cookbooks, so this year I’m challenging myself to focus on one cookbook for a month, and cook as many things out of it as time and resources allow, and document my journey here. I’m not super into messing around with recipes and “making them my own.” I believe in the authority of pros, and will try my best to follow the recipes as written, attribute everything, and, here’s a novel notion, actually read all the stuff in the book that some amazing chef wrote with their heart and soul which I skip over way too often. And share some highlights. If you want original recipes, try going to the NYT comments section. Those people can substitute like they know what they’re doing.

Parameters: I’m not working right now, so my earliest forays will likely be time intensive, but conservative on the money. So… Julia Child’s Garlic Soup sounds right. Speaking of, I’m starting with Mastering the Art of French Cooking, because that seems like the place to start. Why? Because it’s right here, and I don’t want to walk into the other room.

And I’m going to resist the urge to buy new equipment, so no Apple Charlottes right now.

Also, I really like the way Julia lays out recipes, so even when I’m not doing one of her recipes, I think I’ll try to copy her formatting at least with the way she groups ingredients and instructions.

Ahh… I garden and try to grow as much of our produce as I can, so I’ll also be keeping things as seasonal as I can. So the recipes I choose from a given book will be largely bound by that. I have Joshua McFadden’s new (and frankly incredible) Six Seasons by me, so I’ll save that for Spring or Summer when I’m growing a lot of the veggies, but it means that when I do it, I’ll only be able to focus on one section, which is cutting a seasonal or market-style cookbook a bit of short shrift. If I’ve cooked any other recipes from that book, I’ll let you know. Six Seasons is a real banger.

It’s Winter now, and we just had a big freeze (12 degrees is big for us here in the Puget Sound area) and I don’t have ton of stuff coming out of the garden right now, but I do have a backup of homegrown garlic, and onions, and potatoes, and winter squash. And I have a lot of produce I’ve preserved in the freezer. So if Julia wants fresh tomatoes in February, I’m gonna sub in canned, or just not do that recipe. If she wants fresh kale, chances are I’ll sub in frozen harvested from before the snow hit us. I’ll make strawberry deserts when strawberries are in season. But I have some cherries I canned last Summer, so I may try subbing in canned cherries if the recipe calls for fresh. I have a dehydrator, so frankly if something just requires a mirepoix, I’ll likely throw in from my dehydrated stash.

What else. Oh I’m cooking for two. There is a Luke here, and he doesn’t like… well: licorice (which includes anything with fennel or tarragon, although I’m still working on those a bit), shellfish for the most part, duck, green olives, coconut (that one’s an allergy), cherries I guess, and a few more things I can’t recall right now. Seems like more every day, but he hands me things from the top shelf and rotates my tires, and loves/tolerates my cats LooLoo/Skrimshaw (respectively) and so I beat on.

I’ll try to include pictures, but food photography is not my forte, nor my passion, and my kitchen lighting situation does not do it any favors. But I was looking at Ina Garten’s Instagram, and it looks like she has the same deal, and she posts real food she serves Jeffery in bad lighting. I’m going to be serving food in my home, to my Luke, with the lighting I have, after dark, and actually trying to eat it while it’s hot, in an imperfect space, probably onto a tv tray so we can watch Duck Tales, and I’m not going to spend a bunch of time plating it like a pro or buying the perfect dishes, or setting up auxiliary lighting and serving cold food. This is food for us to eat, sometimes out of ingredients we grow, from cookbooks I own. Am I starting to sound a bit defensive? Have you guys seen the internet? I hate the internet. It’s the worst.

Oh, and I guess the last thing is if you’re looking for another cooking blog that starts with a 600 word essay about the first time I ate an eclaire during my travels through Luxembourg on plaid trains in heritage mini-skirts (and of course you are because who isn’t looking for more of that shit), this isn’t it. I’m cooking food from other people’s cookbooks. I’ll try to jump into it.