It turns out I’m not great with the milestones here on MetaCookbook. I realized awhile back that we had crossed 100 entries (a small, but should be noteworthy milestone) and I hadn’t even noticed. Last night, while talking to Kristi L2, I thought we’d posted more than 150 entries, but looking at it today, we’re not quite there yet. I probably won’t notice when we do¹. I didn’t notice that we’re actually 7 months into this challenge, not the 6 I was thinking.

I did notice, though, that we’re coming up on one of the most important milestones for the challenge we’ve given ourselves. In fact, I noticed it enough that I’d hoped to hit it by the end of the year. Alas, we did not manage to even cook, much less post, 100 recipes this year. We got close. We cooked about 90 recipes this year, and we posted 80.

Frankly, I think that’s something worth celebrating too. I get the feeling it’s fairly easy to abandon a blog early on, and certainly some sort of daunting challenge like this, and we haven’t. We’ve plugged along, trying new food and new recipes and writing about it all along the way. We’ve found out just how hard it is to photograph and cook at the same time. (I still haven’t figured out how those other bloggers do it; they have my admiration.) We’ve really begun to grasp just what we’ve put in front of ourselves. (At this rate, it’ll be ~13 years before we get to buy ourselves another cookbook. And that’s only if no one else gives us another one.) That’s a long time. I can’t even begin to predict how our lives will change in 13 years.

That said, we simply have no intention of stopping. As of today, we’ve cooked about 90 recipes of the 2599 we need to cook before we go hog wild on the cookbooks. That’s brilliant, but leaves plenty of room for hitting more goals and learning more and trying more. And it leaves us a lot of years of having little “chats” like these. A lot of room to learn and grow. AND EAT!

So that’s where we’ve been. Let me give you a few of my thoughts on where we’re going in 2011.

As a personal goal, I plan to post at least 200 recipes to MetaCookbook by Christmas of this year. This will count the ~10 still waiting to be posted, but leaves room for another ~190+ that need to be cooked. I’m posting that here so you all can keep Bill and I honest (and push us come late September when we’ve got a quarter left to get ’em cranked out).

Beyond recipes, though, MetaCookbook will continue to be about our relationship with food. I’m learning and relearning how to cook in front of you guys. I’m not going to say I started from scratch in the learning department, but I hope that with cooking all these (ostensibly) tried and true recipes, I’m learning how flavors work together, what “medium-high” means for my stove, how to translate “medium-high” to someone else’s stove, and how to tell when a tomato is ripe.

In light of that, expect to see some more posts about our “holiday or other dinner parties”:http://www.metacookbook.com/archives/138-A-few-Thanksgiving-photos..html or “gardening on our balcony and windowsills.”:http://www.metacookbook.com/archives/77-Im-very-impatient..html (For the record, the plants in that post survived the transplanting, but contracted spider mites badly enough that I couldn’t get rid of them. They’re all dead now. I’ll be trying again with just one herb plant here shortly. Wish me luck.)

Likely, there will also be the occasional post about a restaurant we visited. I don’t know how interested folks are in that, but it’s more food deliciousness (or possibly not) we get to talk to you about.

Beyond that, I don’t know what you’ll see here. I hope you’ll see a good deal more of Mr. Bill posting, because he loves to be in the kitchen. I hope you’ll see some notation about the really big milestones, and maybe some on the smaller ones (150 posts, anyone??).

Thanks for reading.

fn1. Except that, to post this entry, I had to go look at my front page. So now I know and now I will. But I probably won’t really make a fuss about it.