Happy 2008!

Happy New Year, everyone!

December ended up being crazy, and I didn't make much that I was inspired to post about here.

However, I wanted let everyone know that I haven't forgotten this little blog here, and post about something that I'm looking to start doing here in 2008. I came across this book on our donations table at the library:



No, that's not a dirty word; it's German. A German language cookbook! It's from 1985, it assumes that the reader is someone who already has good knowledge of cooking, and it's arranged alphabetically. You read that right. The first chapter is "A", and includes Artischoke (artichoke), Ananas (pineapple), Aubergine (eggplant), Apfel (apple)... It's the strangest cookbook layout I've ever seen.

Each chapter starts with an introduction that talks about the ingredients, and then gets into the recipes for that letter. Every recipe in the book that starts with A is in the first chapter, arranged not by course or ingredient, but simply by recipe title. So, the first page of recipes includes an apple tart, an anchovy-flavored sauce, a Christmas cookie, and an African-style fish with bananas.

The directions for the recipes assume that you know what you're doing. The aforementioned Christmas cookie recipe says to put the cookies on a sheet and bake them. There's no oven temperature given, no length of time that they should bake for, no details about how to tell when your beaten egg whites have reached proper stiffness... in short, it's the type of cookbook that you'd never see on the shelf at Borders.

I'm hoping to use this as inspiration and use the basic (and slightly vague) recipes as a jumping-off point. There's a lot of room here to improvise and find ways to make these recipes my own, and in turn, perhaps that'll give me something more to say here and give me more reason to post. This isn't to say that my love of Epicurious is going away, or that my baking projects won't still turn up. However, interspersed with that, I'd like to find a way to let my own cooking style come through a bit more (I blame Top Chef. "There's no 'you' in this dish."). Updates are coming soon, once I can dust myself off from the holidays and get back into a normal routine.

I hope everyone had a nice holiday season!