The Unwritten Rule, and my choice to rage against it



I know I’m going against the unwritten rule that blog postings should be fairly short and sweet, but I figure, what the hey?  Since I’m pretty much just doing this for my own benefit, it doesn’t matter, right?   Although, once I’ve muddled thru the “getting to know me” phase and setup of this blog idea’s pathway, I expect my updates to become quite a bit briefer, and probably accompanied by far more photos, such as these:

Baked Cinnamon Apple Bread Pudding with Panettone

Curried Red Lentil Soup



Pain au Chocolat and Croissant

Panettone French Toast



Tarte au Citron

 

          The biggest and most time consuming portion of this project is that I need to decide what trail to follow.  Should I cook one recipe per meal, per day, a variety of salads one week, or soup and protein one day, alternate chicken with other proteins, or basically, how do I wish to start?  I just need to keep it real and remind myself that this isn’t written in stone, so if the pathway I begin  upon doesn’t seem to be satisfying, I possess the ability to simply change the track I’m on, and how I’m tackling my venture.  There IS no fail, unless I simply just DON’T even begin!

SO many options, my head’s swimming, just like my inability to finally throw a wine-tasting party, because I can’t decide which way to go with the layout – 5 different whites OR reds, 3 of each, one varietal from a region (or from various regions of the world), various vintages from 1 specific winery, etc.  Serve finger foods WITH the wine, or after tasting.  The options are nearly limitless – argh!

Initially I thought about just rolling 3 dice each day to choose the book I’ve assigned that number to, then rolling again to decide on the recipe page.  But, that would make it difficult to know if I have those ingredients on hand, wouldn’t it, so I should perhaps do this once per week and write a shopping list for one specialized trip that week.

          What about “the month of all things …” meat, veggies, grains, desserts, breakfast, breads, etc.?  Nah, probably at most I could visualize pursuing “the week of”. 

          Once I’ve been underway for a few months, I may simply ask for suggestions/requests from those who have any of these books, or who just want a recipe tested for a certain ingredient.  How about a spinning wheel with the categories of Breads/Pizza, Cakes/Cupcakes/Muffins, Cookies, Baking (other – sweet OR savory), Breakfast/Brunch, Ice Cream, Desserts, Chocolate, Wine, Amuse-Bouche/Appetizers, Asian, Italian (Pasta, Risotto), Mexican, Famous Chefs/Pros, Meats (Chicken, Pork, and Beef), Seafood, Soups, Vegetarian/Healthy/Salads, Misc., Casseroles/Slow Cookers, and Beverages/Smoothies?

                    Well, I’m definitely thinking at least one recipe/week needs to be healthy in some manner, whether total vegetarian or just minimally meat based, accompanied by a cleansing grain of some variety.    And, for every “famous chef” recipe, there should be a counterpart based on some good, old-fashioned down-home vittles. 

          I could choose my favorite recipe of the week, and then nominate one for the month, ending the year with the best of each category, and best book overall.  I believe I may be starting this adventure within the categories of Amuse-Bouche, Appetizers, and Soups/Salads.  Light bites. 

                    Last week I dropped by my local library and checked out a couple of books on blogging, so I’ve spent some time this past week jotting down notes of interest, mostly from glancing thru the Blogging for Dummies book.  Nothing truly of real interest until I hit Chapter 4, but who knows?  You always have to get a quarter of the way into most how-to books to start gleaning actual info, don’t you?

          Well, it’s very rough, but as you may see, beginning March 1^st, I went ahead and posted my first 2 entries to kuku4cookbooks.blogspot.com, including a photo of one shelf that houses my Alton Brown books, amongst others. 

Kinda jazzed about this!  Hope you’ve enjoyed those few photos of foods I’ve placed above, just to whet your appetite for more.

I shall continue with this blog, assuming there is someone out there who might draw their attention to and find some curiosity when reading of my project.  While I am not considering this project for anyone else’s involvement, admittedly it would be fun to have someone follow along with this while I’m accomplishing what I’m setting out to finish.

By the next posting, my goal is to have chosen the first set of recipes to start my journey out upon.  Ciao for today, and thanks for reading!



From Well-Done to Done Well

 

I grew up a meat-and-potatoes kid on a 100-acre farm where my mother's parents raised Black Angus cattle.  We had a nice-sized veggie garden, and quite a # of acres of corn, mostly for feed for the cattle, along with timothy and clover that was baled for feed. We canned our own veggies, like corn, green beans, dried beans for soup, or fruits purchased at an orchard, such as peaches. 

 

Of course, this was in the dinosaur ages before cell phones (yes, we had a dial phone), I-pods (again, we had 45 and 33 rpm vinyl record albums to go along with tape cassettes).  This was even before <gasp> CDs or VCRs, so not even beta, let alone a DVR.  And horror of horrors, we could only receive 3 channels on the TV with any regularity.  No cable, and LONG before Food Network or the Cooking Channel.  The best you could hope for was that PBS would be viewable that day, and you'd be able to watch Julia Child or Graham Kerr (the Galloping Gourmet). 

Meals were simple, and they were eaten at home, not in a restaurant.  We had to drive at least 20 minutes to even go to the closest McDonald's, not that that is a "treat" any longer.  And I was 16 before I even ate pizza.  Hard to believe what a prominent presence it takes in my life lately. 

 

My mother cooked pork thoroughly, to a bone-dry dark brown, and we needn't discuss the nearly black and always dried out beef that dominated our dining choices, since we always had the freezer full of packages of our home-raised beef.  Her grey cubed steak was a thing of legends, edible only when thickly coated with a layer of Open Pit BBQ sauce.  It was typically paired with either mashed potatoes or a boxed mac-and-cheese, the tiniest connection I had to "Italian" - boxed pasta.   Mom would literally gag if she saw the medium-rare I typically go for these days when dining on beef, and most certainly would not eat the lightly-pink toned pork we are able to prepare safely today.  

 

Mercifully, my tastes have changed, or rather, as I've matured and moved away from that immediate area, I've been exposed to and allowed to pursue so many other foods besides the limited range I grew up eating.  I never would have had any exposure to Chinese, Mexican, or even Italian, let alone Thai, Indian, Brazilian, or any of the many other cuisines I'm now fairly comfortable calling dinner.  The closest I may have gotten to rice is once I'm fairly certain Mom used it to make porcupine balls (meatballs with rice inside).  Ooh, let's live it up and be adventurous tonight!  Hope my stomach can handle the variety...

 

I consider myself quite thankful that I got out of the Podunk village I was raised in when I did, 'cuz otherwise I'd probably live in some low-rental area, dining on hot dogs, French fries, and mac & cheese all the time.  Not that I'm at ALL a city girl, but when you had to drive nearly an hour to get to Cleveland (and this was before it blossomed into the food destination it is becoming), you didn't have much variety.  I mean, the only "restaurant" in my hometown was a DQ, and as I recall, they only served soft-serve, and not even the hot dogs, burgers, or chicken you can now get at some of them.  This was a time before even the Blizzard was available, so your choices were vanilla or chocolate, with hot fudge, caramel, or strawberry sauce. 

 

This blog will not be strictly about my cookbook project, but you'll experience the intertwining of some of my other hobbies, from traveling to photography to wine to restaurants, and possibly even some crafting, i.e. scrapbooking.  I don't expect a following, so essentially this will most likely become my own nearly-private journal, and that's okay.  I'm undertaking this because I want to feel more alive again, and I have to admit, I've been feeling pretty jazzed ever since I meshed this idea together a couple of weeks ago.  It's giving me a sense of accomplishment that I'm setting out on this fascinating (to me) endeavor. 

 

Next post will likely expose you to the fleshing out of the aspects of exactly how I'm thinking this project will proceed, once I get into the actual cooking portion.  There are just so many variables to choose from, but I believe I'm rapidly narrowing the possibilities down to one or two that are the most feasible approach(es) to take.

 

Ciao for now, and go out this week and try some new dishes you'd never even considered before!

Just the beginnings...

March 1, 2015 - Simply the very first  "post" I'm attempting, as I've never blogged before.  So much more to come later...once I've run thru a few how-to pages, so please bear with me.  For a taste of my subject, here's one shelf containing a small portion of my cookbooks.

By this photo, you may (correctly) assume I'm an avid Alton Brown fan.  There'll be more photos of the remainder of my cookbooks later...


Okay, so I'm admittedly a little cra-cra addicted to amassing quite a variety of cookbooks - over 210 to date - with no end in sight.

I've always been drawn to books.  Novels are all fine and dandy - I'm well known at my local library, where I lean towards culinary mysteries, such as the Goldy Bear series by Diane Mott Davidson, or Avery Aames' Fromagerie Bessette series about cheese and wine, or Joanna Carl's series on TenHuis Chocolates, or Cleo Coyle's Coffeehouse Mysteries, or Joanne Fluke's series about Hannah Swenson, just to note a few of the longer-running series.

But, if I'm going to plunk down my dollars on a book I'm planning on keeping, it's gonna be for a hardback non-fiction book, whether it's one on my other hobbies, like scrapbooking, jewelry making, card-making, etc., OR yet another cookbook.  So, I tend to test-drive food and wine books from my local library or thru Search Ohio or Ohio-Link, where that particular library may be 5+ hours from my home.

Once I pick them up, I spend time thumbing my way from cover to cover, jotting down page numbers for recipes I find interesting and different from the so many others I already have.  If there are enough "new" recipes, I'll end up buying the book, no doubt from an on-line source, where I can expect to receive a 25-40% discount, along with free shipping.  Sorry, but I greatly miss my local Borders, where I could use a 40% off coupon, as opposed to that other "shall-not-be-named" national bookstore chain that gives out at best a 15% off coupon, which just about pays for the tax and perhaps the gas to get to the store.

It's pretty much a given parameter that the book must be adorned with more than a few beautifully enticing color photos of various tempting recipes, or "food porn," if we must be honest.  I mean, truthfully, don't you find yourself lusting after the foods so artistically arranged and plated by those professional food stylists and so seductively lit and permanently digitalized by the photographers, that you feel your mouth filling with saliva, and can almost taste them?

All this has me proposing to myself that over the next 5 years, or until 2020, that I will work through at least 5 recipes from every book I possess, and document with photos, journals, blogging, or by whatever other means I decide to attempt.

Although, upon coming to the realization that I have over 200 books, and that would mean over 1,000 recipes to try - hmm...Perhaps I'll scale that back to only 3 recipes per book, and/or limit the number of books to a more manageable total.  We're talking 4 years and 10 months, so that's a shade less than 1800 days.

And, while I love to cook, it's not my only interest, and I do travel from time-to-time, plus I need to do the grocery shopping for my ingredients, so, yep, looks like I need to weed out quite a # of these books.  Let's start by excluding those books I accumulated before a certain year, like 20 years ago.  That already deletes my Time-Life series - The Good Cook, from some time in the 70's to 80's, so there goes 19 - already down below 200!

Now, initially I was thinking I'd attempt the more molecular variations of "modern" cuisine, such as pressing my way through Modernist Cuisine at Home, but I got to thinking there has to be quite a # of recipes + techniques in there that I'd not enjoy partaking of, or that would be difficult to locate ingredients for, or that utilize expensive uni-tasker tools and equipment, i.e. sous vide.

Now that my kids are teenagers, I've been more seriously searching for something to give more meaning to my life, something for me, and more satisfying than being their taxi driver, 'cuz that gets old real quick.  I need an intriguing subject to occupy my time - interesting, compelling, fun, and possibly a tasty endeavor - I hate to say "hobby", as that seems to trivialize this future experience in my mind.

While I actually trained as a pastry chef, and love the foods associated with that profession, in a way it's more restrictive than the savory side of culinary arts.  With so many categories of baking, it can be such an exact science - measure these ingredients down to the gram, heat to this exact range of degrees or it won't set properly, i.e. it won't be hard crack, or will curdle, etc., that while I will work thru my pastry books in this undertaking, I will be devoting far more time on the culinary aspects.

Despite possessing this personal library, I nearly always find myself free-wheeling my meals.  It's so much simpler to be able to substitute this spice or herb, add more lemon or tomatoes, toss in chunks of squash or pumpkin to render my own variation of hash, etc.  You can't get away with a ton of substitutions with pastry.

- Tomorrow I'll let you get to know more about my background, and you'll see the contrast between my early years growing up on a farm and the foodie I'm becoming.  Ciao, my friends...