The Beginning of the Adventure

Two relatively significant things have happened lately, first I turned 25, and then the year turned 2011.  ‘Big’ birthdays and new years are times when we traditionally look at ourselves and reassess things, and make plans for the current year.  As both of these milestones happen at the same time for me, I have been doing a lot of re-assessing lately. I seem to spend so much time making plans, but hardly any time at all making them actually happen.  So I am going to start. 

The first step to overcoming addiction is admitting you have a problem: I am a reading-cookbooks-and-not-using-them-aholic.  I own 26 cookbooks.  Now I suppose the simple answer would be to just stop buying them, or give some away or something, but I don’t want to do that, I’m cultivating a collection.  What I actually want to do is start cooking from them, in the style of those wonderful cooking blogs that get so popular (but without Julie/Julia’s ambition temper or affairs, or smitten kitchen’s perfection and glossy photos).  Each week I will make something I haven’t made before, from one of my books.  And I will write about it, giving the full recipe the way that I actually made it, and all the gory details.  Currently the oven is a bit of a major handicap: there is only one shelf, and no information on the oven of any kind - until I get an oven thermometer I will be mainly sticking to the hob, or things that require temperatures a bit more vague ie. a bit hot’, ‘quite hot’ and very hot. Or possibly things that don’t require cooking at all.

My dear readers, please feel free to nominate a book, a recipe, course etc, or if something particular is in season, let me know. Also if you want to come and help me eat it, or help me cook, that would be great too.

The first recipe (to be cooked tomorrow for housemates’ movie night)  will be ‘polenta pan-pizza with red onions, garlic mushrooms and mozzarella’, from Complete Vegetarian ed. Nicola Grimes (which by the way, loses major points for putting stuffed mushrooms on the front cover).

Some kind of cliche/pun is called for here involving 'putting my money where my mouth is' but i cant really think of it - winning suggestion will be posted in next note.

if you have got this far, thanks for reading my first ever blog!
love Miri 04.01.11