Hmm.

It's clear the challenge is not going to work as written. I didn't record a meal last night because I ran up against the fact that I only had a few vegetables left in the fridge and am trying to cut out going to the shops specifically for one recipe. I couldn't find anything which I could reasonably make with the vegetables I had which didn't a) come too close to a meal or protein source we'd had in the last couple of days, which I hate doing; b) require so many substitutions as to make it barely following a recipe at all; or c) teach your grandmother to suck eggs - ie. one recipe I found which I could have made last night without substitutions was tuna patties. Um, right. The day I need a recipe to make tuna patties, it won't matter because I'll already be in the nursing home.

I've also discovered that there are classes of cookbooks which are getting a pass even though I don't necessarily want to cook anything out of them in the next couple of months. For instance, the aforementioned recipe for tuna patties came from The Commonsense Cookery Book, which I will be keeping as a resource for my kids as they learn to cook. Another, Farmhouse Cooking, is staying because, while I don't anticipate needing a recipe for curing a ham any time soon, it's rather more likely to come in handy at some point in our proposed homesteading adventures.

Bu ton the other hand, while I didn't find anything I wanted to cook yesterday, I did put five or six books in my cull pile. I'm still trying to decide what to do with the vast number of ethnic cookbooks which require an upfront investment in condiments which I probably won't use up any time soon and will just be annoying to pack. It's also coming up against the fact that I don't necessarily give a rodent's posterior about being authentic if it involves twenty three herbs, spices and sauces when I can just trade that in for a commercial sauce or paste, or make something which tastes awesome but is probably a shocking mismatch of ingredients from different traditions (oh, sorry, I mean Fusion Cuisine). This is probably an admission that I am not a Real Foodie(TM), but meh. Should I turf them all and decide that this is what the internet is for?

That said, I'm not even thinking about getting rid of, say, Claudia Roden or Madhur Jaffrey, because there are some things which One Just Does Not Do.

Anyway. I'll revise my original target to posting here 4 times a week, and anything more than that is a bonus. Also, since I'm not just putting my main meals on trial, I'll try to do more baking as well. I have at least four bread cookbooks and still never make bread by hand, for example. Sigh.