About this blog

Bill and I started this blog because we noticed that we own a lot of cookbooks. We’re not that couple who owns 800+ cookbooks, but we are that couple who would like to someday. And that was the problem.

We already owned several cookbooks, but we had a tendency to buy more and more. We enjoy cookbooks, reading them, cooking from them and even just getting ideas from them. However, at some point we realized two things. First, we kept buying NEW cookbooks, but we haven’t made a dent in using our old cookbooks. Second, we tend to cook a lot of the same things over and over. We both enjoy cooking, and Bill’s pretty good at it, but we both have our fallback meals (just ask Bill if he’s tired of hearing the word “frittata”). Since we’re interested in more creativity in the kitchen, and we do really enjoy experimenting, it seemed odd that we were eating so many stir-fries (and frittatas).

This blog is not actually directly born of those two things, however. Those two things mostly just resulted in us buying a lot of cookbooks and eating outside our own home a lot. We had directly fallen into that same trap so many people do when cooking is a hobby! Buying a lot of cookbooks for the sheer enjoyment of it, and because cooking is fun when done right, but coming home from work with no idea what to make, and feeling so exhausted we ended up eating out instead. Frustrating and expensive.

At some point, Bill suggested that we commit to not buying any cookbooks until we cooked our way through half the recipes in our current cookbooks. All of them. Well, because we like following food blogs, and cooking, and Bill’s a super computer geek, the idea of a food blog had come up before, but now this was an idea we could go for. Neither of us is a recipe inventor (much to my mother’s dismay), nor could either of us could go for attempting to cook every recipe in a book, a la “Alinea at Home”:http://alineaathome.typepad.com/ or “the Julie/Julia project”:http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/ . But the idea of saying “NO” to cookbooks until we’d cooked halfway through the ones we already had – that was an idea.

Of course, an idea is just an idea until something prompts you into action. For us, the prompt was already in the works, but we didn’t know it. See, we’d already decided to purchase a community-supported agriculture (CSA) share from “Tomato Mountain Farm”:http://tomatomountain.com/. I figured a CSA would be a good way to reduce our grocery costs, and that we’d end up eating a lot of things we’d never have tried if left to our own devices. And cooking these new things shouldn’t even be a challenge, really, because we have so many cookbooks! And there’s recipes online!

Well, our first share arrives late 31 May, 2010 (or, if you’re a computer nerd like Bill, 2010 May 31 [2010-05-31 — Bill]). And we’ve been tossing this idea around for months. Suddenly we realized, now’s the time. So we’re about to start seriously cooking. At home, with some brand new stuff (and some old favorites – I’m hoping the first delivery has strawberries). No new cookbooks until we’ve cooked our way through roughly 25% of the recipes currently in our home (see “the Rules” post for details on that number).

One thought on “About this blog

Comments are closed.