The Plan

So, I've been pondering the fact that this blog is more "Rico, Pedro, and Charley are Awesome!" plus a little "The Endless Suffering of a Bucs Fan" than it is "Emily's Culinary Adventures." Last May I posted about a couple recipes from restaurant cookbooks that I tried that weekend, and it was some of the most fun I've had putting a post together. I have a pretty massive cookbook collection, in fact, and countless post-its scattered throughout those books marking recipes that I want to try "someday." Well, my friends, someday officially begins... next weekend. With the exception of times when I can't cook for whatever reason (travel, surgery, kitchen flood...), I plan to pull out one of my awesome cookbooks every other weekend and give a recipe (or two?) a go. Further, I will think of this as training. I've gotten out of practice with recipe-following. I like to use them as inspiration and just sort of do my thing (making an Emily-style version of any given recipe), and I often lack the patience to pay attention to detail, especially if I'm in the proverbial weeds. But I need to get back into practice and hone my detail-paying-attention-to skills if I'm going to conquer a recipe from this bad boy:
by the end of the year. Thus, the plan: Fortnightly testing of (hopefully) kick-ass recipes from my cookbook collection, building towards an end game of pulling off a Heston Blumenthal recipe from The Big Fat Duck Cookbook before the end of the year. It sits in a position of honor atop my bookcase, the pride of my collection, mocking me with its beauty and complexity (I think the simplest recipe has a mere 5 pages of three-columns-of-small-text-per-page instructions), but I plan to show it who's boss... (even if the answer to that question will inevitably be "Mr. Blumenthal"...)