A giant undertaking

So what the heck do I need another blog for? Well, I've been feeling sort of melancholy lately, mostly about not pushing myself to do more, creatively, but also about not having gotten as far in my culinary career as I would have liked before I had kids. Not that I ever wanted to own a restaurant or anything like that, but I have such a passion for food that I feel like it's a shame to let that fall by the wayside.

So this is the grand master plan: I'm going to start picking out cookbooks from my ever-growing collection, which I think currently stands at about 50+ (and some of which I have shamefully never even cracked open), and methodically cook my way through each of them.

The goal is to cook every single recipe in the chosen book, although I make no promises that I will actually be able to complete each one. I suspect that some recipes just might not be possible, perhaps because the ingredients are impossible to find or they're simply beyond my skill level. I'm also not sure if I'm going to cook the recipes in order or not. I guess it'll all depend on how it's arranged and how I'm feeling. There are no hard and fast rules here, at least not yet.

My end goal in doing this is the hope that it will force me to hone my rusty skills, expand my palate, teach me some new techniques, as well as give me inspiration to come up with my own ideas and recipes. It'll also force me to cook more in general, and to have people over to eat more often. And ideally, I'd like to take some nice photos of each dish as well so I can work on my photography skills too, but that might be pushing my luck.

For my first cook-a-book, I'm going with one of the first cookbooks I ever bought: Jacques Pepin's Kitchen: Cooking with Claudine. I remember watching the accompanying show on PBS way back when and being really drawn in by how easy everything looked. At the time, I had no idea who Jacques Pepin was, only that Claudine came off as a total moron and if he could teach her, well then maybe I could swing it too. I remember making a fair number of the recipes in that book, mostly for friends who didn't cook much and were easily impressed. I'm hoping that people will be just as impressed now, 10+ years later.

So bear with me on this work in progress. And I welcome any and all (constructive) criticism, so please feel free to leave comments!