12monthsofcooking.com

It’s become the habit of news magazines to do a year-end retrospective. So looking back what were the great recipes, the good recipes, and the not-so-goods of last-year? I’m not normally a dessert person but most of the “sweet stuff” was really great. The January pudding-pie, December’s cake, and April’s lemon-raspberry cupcakes were all great. Both September’s Chicken parmesan and February’s pancakes were also great. Rating the winners – my wife would say that January was the best ever, with December a close second.

The in-betweens – November’s chicken (stuffing was great, and so was the “salting” technique, but the chicken was so-so); September’s chili (the squash didn’t quite work); the chipotle burgers (great sauce, great onions, so-so with the English muffin). The corned-beef sandwich was good – but I wouldn’t rate it as great (I’ve since learnt that it’s easy to make a grilled sandwich taste good). The steak-frites were good, but alas not great.

The not-so-greats were the Cherry-pie (great crust but not worth the calories/effort); and the chocolate covered cherry ice-cream (my own personal Titanic).

Was there some incredible piece of wisdom I gained? There were a few – I think the cherry-ice-cream was the most illuminative. Keep the simple, simple (aka KISS!). I also learnt how important it is to not rush things, particularly cooking. Wherever possible give yourself enough time, measure everything beforehand, and make sure you have all the ingredients.

Was it ‘worth’ it? I enjoyed it immensely, and I definitely ended up cooking more than I normally would have. I also cooked a lot of items that I would have dismissed as being “too hard” .

So what will I do this year? I toyed with the idea of cooking a ‘letter-a-month’ from Larousse’s Gastronomique cooking encyclopedia but it didn’t seem that it would work ( I would only cook my way to ‘L’ in a year, and it would be very french). I also thought of doing a “meat a month” but unfortunately it didn’t seem like it could work ( what do you cook after beef, lamb, pork, chicken) ? I played with cooking fewer recipes – but it seems that would require me to change my domain-name. It seems like I was trying to find a way to force myself to “cook something” but I also wanted a little more freedom. It would also be nice to be-able to “cook ahead” a little bit, doing every month was a grind sometimes. I know I will be very busy this year from April (we are expecting a new baby) so a way to breathe easier was definitely something I’m looking for.

Thanks to my sister-in-law, I am now subscribed to both Bon-Appetit, and Gourmet magazine. So my final solution is to cook at least 12 recipes this year, from both magazines. I won’t just limit myself to cover recipes – there’s a lot of good stuff throughout both magazines. Instead I will only do six cover-recipes (hence I have a new challenge – choosing a recipe). I’m looking forward to another 12 months of cooking!