Hi, my name is Virginia, and I have a bit of a cookbook problem. As in, I have a whole heck of a lot of them. I read (and buy) cookbooks for pleasure, and have managed to accumulate more than 250…so far.
Over the course of my life as a home cook, I find myself returning repeatedly to the same few cookbooks and not utilizing all of them to their full potential. When I moved in with Chris a year and a half ago, our combined cookbooks became a source of new and interesting data for me, however, I noticed that Chris generally gravitates to the cookbooks that he came to the relationship with, and I generally use the ones that I brought.
Also, we have a blended family of five: Chris has two biological children and I have one. We also have two dogs and four cats. Here’s the human portion of our platoon:
Front row: Georgia, Lucinda and Francis
I wanted to use our massive cookbook library to its full potential, so I came up with the idea of cooking at least one recipe from each book, particularly one that I hadn’t cooked before. Chris, probably because he’s slightly insane too, thought this was a great idea, and he volunteered to join me in this experiment.
The other awesome thing is that this project of ours will solve the whole question of “but what’s for dinner?” at least two nights a week.
Cooking the Books 