The Project …

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Ok, so I’m about to embark on a new project.  I’m not entirely sure of the sense of this, because life is pretty busy and a new project probably isn’t what I need, but …

I own a lot of cook books.  At a guess I would say I have about 3 or 4 dozen.  A few years ago I got to the point where I started to feel guilty about buying new cook books.  For a while I stopped.  Or nearly stopped.  There were a few gifts from people and I think I may have brought the odd one or two myself but I cut down, a lot.  I realised that I had probably only cooked a small percentage of the recipes I had.  It wouldn’t surprise me if it was as low as five percent, less maybe.  Actually I know The Silver Spoon cook book has around 2000 recipes in it so it will be much less than five percent. So I decided that rather than buying new books I would cook more recipes I had never attempted from the books I already owned.  I had some success with this.  But the vast majority of the recipes I own remain uncooked.

Lately I have gotten over this guilt and started buying cook books and cookery magazines with, at least, the same regularity as I used to.  I get as much pleasure from reading the books as I do from cooking with them. In fact I probably get as much pleasure from just looking at the pictures.  I treat some of these books as coffee table books and just have a quick browse every now and then.  I have decided that even if I don’t cook a single recipe from a book, if I’ve enjoyed looking through it then it was worth buying.  I know we all, or at least those of us lucky enough to have a bit of spare money at the end of the month, have those things that we are prepared to spend money on, and spend it a little irrationally.  We also all have those things we begrudge spending money on.  For me, for example, I don’t spend money on cars.  I have never brought a new (or even vaguely newish) car.  I have only ever brought cars out as an absolute necessity.  I have owned four cars in my life time and only bought two of them, I was given the other two.  I was given my current car four years ago, and each year that it still goes through its MOT with relative ease (just one £3 part this year) is another year I don’t have to buy (or acquire) a new one.  I will however, buy cook books when I don’t need them.  I could probably cook a new recipe every night for the next twenty or thirty years and not exhaust my collection.

 While I may have gotten over the guilt of spending more money than is reasonable on cook books, there was something that I wanted to achieve during my book buying moratorium that I didn’t achieve.  I didn’t even come close.  For a long time I have wanted to cook through an entire cook book.  I have wanted to cook every single recipe in a book.  Before now I haven’t even really got down to the business of seriously choosing which book I will cook my way through.  Some books are so big and have so many recipes, some of which some would be very expensive, that the task is very daunting.  The first time I seriously considered doing this was when Jamie Oliver brought out his 30 Minute Meals.  Now I should add that 30 Minute Meals came out whilst I was on my book buying moratorium.  I did not buy this book.  It was bought for me (as it was for many people) as a Christmas present.  This book, is probably uniquely placed to be easier than most to cook your way through.  Each “recipe” is an entire meal.  You don’t have to look through your chosen book and find the main part of the dish (the meat for example) and then find the bits that supplement the main bit (the vegetables say) from elsewhere in the book.  Most books have a section of starters and puddings as well.  So you need to pair (or trio) dishes together that work.  Now at the beginning this will be easy for any vaguely competent cook.  But as you work your way through the book, it will get harder.  You may run out of some types dishes and then what do you? Do you repeat a vegetable dish you have already cooked, or are you free to dip into another book or make something up?  And also what happens if a recipe for a main dish suggests a side dish to go with it, but the book itself doesn’t contain the recipe, where do you go?

 Ok so I know I’m being really pedantic and it would be possible, more than possible, easy in fact to cook your way through any number of books.  And there is really nothing to say that you can’t add in a recipe from someone else, after all the purpose of the exercise is just to cook every recipe in a book and not to only cook from that book.  The point I’m making, in a wafflely way, is that 30 Minute Meals made it really easy, all the decision were made.  All you had to do was buy the ingredients, get a few buddies round, and cook.

 So why didn’t I do it? There were a number of reasons.  Even though the nature of the book gave the project a relative ease, it is still quite a daunting task.  All the meals are really nice and quite big meals.  They are not really meals that you would cook on a Tuesday night as a quick meal for the family before you all go about the other tasks that you do on a Tuesday night.  They are meals that you may be able to cook quite fast (with a bit of practice I would argue), but they were meals then to be enjoyed.  They have something of an occasion about them.  They’re not super special occasion meals, but like I’ve said they’re not a quick Tuesday night with the family kind of affair either.  I would be happy to present any of my friends and family with any of the 30 Minute Meals and have confidence that they were being given something a little special.  In its self this isn’t a reason to not cook through the book as a project but it makes it a more daunting, at least longer, task.  There are 50 recipes in 30 Minute Meals.  At the rate of 1 a week that’s a year long project.  With how my life is, I doubt that I could realistically achieve more than 1 meal like that a week on average.  Also, although not a massive issue, some of the recipes do work out to be relatively expensive.  So, while this may not stop you cooking through the book as a project, it does make doing several recipes a week more problematic.

 So I think that 15 Minute Meals is a good candidate for the reasons I never actually took on the project of cooking through 30 Minute Meals.  I am confident that these would still be meals I would be happy put in front of my friends but at the very least I should be able to cook through the book relatively quickly.  There are other reasons that I am particularly keen to do this project with this particular book.  I’m a pretty ok cook.  But I am best at cooking for other people and best when there is at least a small sense of occasion to it.  By this I mean a Sunday lunch type affair rather than a quick meal on a Tuesday night before I go out for the evening.  I really am not that good at cooking quick meals.  I live on my own, and I have done for some time.  This has made me a worse, or at least a more lazy, cook than I used to be.  I only really make an effort when I cook for other people and of late it’s got pretty bad.  If no one’s coming round for dinner then the food I’ve been cooking, is barely cooking at all, and sometimes it definitely isn’t cooking.  It’s been straying into the something on toast (or just toast, or just bread and a bit olive oil and vinegar) territory for too long now.  So the appeal of this book is that it is aimed at helping you do those quicker, but good, meals.  If I’m honest I don’t have all that many of those in my repertoire.  So I hope that this will make me a better cook in that kind of way.  The very act of doing this project will also get me to cook more than I have been doing lately as well.  Also I’ve got a bit slack at having people over for dinner lately and so doing this should get me back to cooking for people more often again.