Challenge Accepted - Book #1

Tuesday, 26 May 2020

I think I have the normal amount of recipe books.  Not heaps and heaps, but enough to fill the top shelf of the pantry.  Please note this doesn't include my specialty Cake Decorating books which are mostly kept elsewhere.

I don't know if anyone else has the same experience but I tend to only use the same 1 or 2 recipes from 70% the books I own and I never even open the other 30%. 

So I have challenged myself (and thus the rest of our household), to move through the shelf of books, from left to right, and make 1 new recipe from each.   We have to get through at least 2 books a week, and as we do them, I will decide whether the book is worth keeping on the shelf, or letting go.

Please note that as soon as I declared this challenge Zali and Jett speedily and tactically organised the shelf so the good stuff (cakes, desserts and chocolate recipes) were spread nice and evenly from left to right. 

So today I pulled from the shelf the first book .. Hello Veganomicon...

I bought this (highly rated) book to give to Denny when she became vegan, but then I decided it was probably better if I kept it myself to prepare vegan family dinners.  Despite my intentions I don't think I actually made one single thing from it - instead I just adapted my existing suite of recipes to be more vegan friendly. And now Denny isn't a vegan anymore.

I remembered why I haven't used it as soon as I opened it up  - it contains tonnes and tonnes of recipes, but no photos.   I really need photos!  Still I wasn't going to fall at the first hurdle, so I selected something that looked workable and tonight we had Curried Udon Noodle Stir Fry. It was a bit weird to make  as I had to make a roux for the sauce then mix it in at the very end, but after a longish time (for stirfry) we ended up with something quite good:

So a success! I'm not sure I'd return to that particular recipe, but I've since discovered that not only has someone made a YouTube channel of himself making heaps of the recipes, but someone else has a pinterest collection of lots of them. Cool!  So that book is a keeper - back to the shelf it goes.