My Challenge

Hello there!

At this stage, I am alone in my journey so I guess I am speaking to myself and myself alone, but hello, and congratulations on starting your challenge. I am doing a year long challenge– and it’s a doozy. I’m attempting to make 500 recipes from my stack of cookbooks over the next year. I’m doing this for many reasons including:

1. I own a lot of cookbooks. At the current count, we’re at 23 cookbooks. Some are left from my mom but a lot are from myself. I get drawn into cookbooks and cooking shows at all of the wonderful and lovely things one can prepare but my problem is, I stop there. I buy the book, look at it going, “Oh yes, I should make that, that sounds amazing!” and on the shelf it sits. I really would love to make some of the recipes from my shelf.
2. To be quite honest, I need a hobby. My husband and I are at the bottom of the barrel on our Netflix playlist. I thought of things I enjoyed and they were: TV, food, writing, photography and baking. This combines all of them (i.e. I can bake whilst watching Netflix, and then photograph it and write about it on this blog). Win-win-win-win, in my book.
3. I spend far too much money eating food outside of the house. I don’t make time to cook and often find I don’t have the energy. With some careful planning and if I make it into something I will enjoy, I’m hoping to eat healthier (marginally) and spend less money.
4. Simply put, I would like to improve my cooking skills. I feel like I used to be quite a good cook and quite a good baker. But when I think about it, I thought it was good and I was complimented mostly because there wasn’t a lot to compare it to. My food was tasty when I was in my early 20s when I was right out of college and not a lot of my peers could do anything other than microwave. I feel like I got cocky and felt like I knew my way around the kitchen and then I would start burning things and convincing myself that was all right because I wouldn’t time things correctly, or I would over or under spice. Tonight, I told my husband I was going to go to the store to pick something up and I came home and said ok I’ll start dinner, he said, “Oh, you’re going to cook…. oh…” I would really like to stop that reaction.
5. Finally, at the end of a year (if I go through with this challenge, let’s be real), I’m hoping to have my own recipe book. My mom had a recipe book which I now own that had recipes from her grandmother and recipes people had passed on to her as well as recipes she cooked from cook books and magazines which became family favorites. I’d like to have my own recipe book of tried and tested recipes to just flip through and go, “Oh yea, that was good, dinner’s planned.”

Now then, let me introduce you to my challenge. While it’s myself challenging myself and I feel like I will throw in an awful lot of cheating (because who is the judge of me but me), I do have a few ground rules I’d like to start with. We’ll see how this goes.

1. I must cook 500 recipes in 365 days. My official start date is December 3, 2018.
2. No recipe shall be repeated.
3. However, dishes may be repeated (i.e. which chili is the best chili) once.
4. Each week will have some sort of theme. If I have any Great British Baking Show fans reading this (hi Charlie and Andrew), the title of the blog may sound familiar. My inspiration comes from this show and every week there are three challenges based around a theme (i.e. bread week, Danish week, etc.). Themes cannot be repeated.
5. I must make at last one recipe from each cookbook.

I may add rules as we go along, but first things first, I have to start. On my mark, get set, challenge! Cook? Try? Eat? I’ve gotta work on that…