I meant to post yesterday, but since I'm not home, my schedule has been a little strange. I do have a crust-less quiche recipe/adventure to share with you all, but that will have to wait for a day or two until I settle back down in Tucson.
I also keep meaning to post about my April plans, since I've been telling people about them vaguely. I don't have all the details figured out, but have a tentative outline. :) So, originally, the plan was to cook every day for a month and to structure it as a fundraiser to raise money for a local food pantry. However, the more I think about it, the more I remember how much of a wimp I am about fundraising, especially when it's something so self-driven (rather than for school or another organization). I had some (well, many) ideas on how to do it, but it was all feeling more and more aversive. So, I've decided to nix the fundraising aspect of the thing for now. I may decide to try it further down the road, but not on this particular venture.
So, now that you know what I'm not going to do, what am I actually going to do? Well, the current plan is that in the month of April, I will cook a different recipe every day and document them on the blog. There will be days that I probably won't be able to do this, but I'll try to anticipate those and make 2 things the day before, or something like that. Since the goal of this is to cook new things, I'm going to try for at least half new recipes that I haven't made before. The more new stuff the better, of course, but I also know that there will be times when all I want to do is throw together a pasta sauce, say, and I want to allow for that. I'm also going to try to have a theme each week. I already know that one theme will be Indian food and one will be mushrooms, so there are two more to choose. I'm also starting to collect recipes to try, so if you have any ideas for themes or recipes (vegetarian, please, since I'd like Mu to be able to eat what I make!), let me know. I also know I want to try making my own stock, which sort of isn't a whole recipe on its own, but I'm going to count it as such. :)
Since I know that there will be times that I just can't handle the cooking, I'm going to give myself 2 guilt-free no-cook days. The first will probably actually be April 1st, since that's a Sunday and Mu and I have plans to go to Ren Faire (and hence be gone the whole day). Thus, my official starting day will be April 2nd. I'm also going to try to do prep work all in one day, as much as possible, so that the cooking time is shortened on each individual day. We'll see how well that works. I'll be posting a tentative menu plan each week, and then documenting (hopefully with pictures!) as I go.
Questions or suggestions? Or just general thoughts? I'm happy to hear feedback!
And now for the Tuesday Tip! I was talking with friends about the difficulties of cooking more than one (or maybe 2) dishes at a time, and how none of us are good enough cooks to have the timing for that kind of thing down pat. One thing that came up as a helpful strategy is writing out a list of steps, in the approximate order that one plans to do them in, with the approximate times, and having that in front of you (on the counter can get in the way, but attached with a magnet to the fridge can work!) in order to stay on track. I've tried this a couple of times now, and while I still need a lot of work to make cooking multiple things run smoothly, it really did help to have a plan of action to refer back to. I was off on my times, but at least nothing got forgotten in the chaos!
And there we are! Tomorrow, either the quiche or CSA-related recipes.
No comments:
Post a Comment