The Sacred Art of Eating

A Challenge:

to choose a cookery book – any one you like, as long as it’s not a tiny cookery pamphlet or Larousse Gastronomique – and prepare every single recipe in it before December 31st 2008

and, 366 days and one second, 190 recipes later, we are done. It might be the effect of Annie Lennox on Hootenanny, but I did just cry a wee tear as I put that final finishing touch to The Challenge Page, as I changed the count to zero. It’s been quite a year. More thoughts on that, tomorrow perhaps. In the time being, I’ve written bloody loads in the last few days, so away an read something. And Happy New Year to you all!

Very confusingly, I am posting the last few recipes dated by when we cooked them. Which means there are new posts appearing before this entry, and before the one where I say we’ve only got four recipes to go. So seek, and ye shall find!

You lot don’t know this yet, as I have been horribly remiss in my blogging (hey, it’s Christmas!)* but we only have FOUR recipes to go.

*(and I’m back dating all my posts so they’ll cleverly fall into place before this entry and confuse you all!)

I honestly can’t believe we’ve only got 26 recipes to go. We’d have been a couple of months in to the challenge before we’d got that many under our belt, and yet it seems like so few to go. I’ve been wondering for a couple of days when in December we’ll get back to more than a day per recipe remaining; I suspect we may not (apart from perhaps just after our party) as it looks like we may plan to finish on 31st December, with a posh lunch with friends. Those three recipes would mean we’ll be ‘behind’ to the very end. Still…it’s exciting, knowing how close we are.

Those of you keeping a close eye on The Challenge Page will have noticed that we have reached a dark hour. For the first time in the whole challenge- even after our grim, practically cooking-free July and August- we have more recipes remaining than we do days in the year. 32 recipes to 29 days, to be precise. We were still in the game on Friday when I did the Nutella Pancakes (below) but then foolishly we took a weekend off to head to Aberdeen and act like rock stars and do no cooking at all. So now we are behind.

Arguably we’ve been behind since we got to the ‘third of the way through the challenge, half way through the year’ stage, but recently our personal benchmark for success has been that we’ve still more than one day per recipe remaining.

However, all is not lost. We will probably manage two recipes today, and we have the wherewithal now for another dish that had been eluding us. We are still stuck for 300ml-500ml ovenproof pots, for making individual Chicken and Bacon Pies in, if anyone can be of assistance. And then there’s the Christmas Chapter, which means swathes of recipes we can knock down at the Christmas Party or as gifts.

It’ll be FINE.

How’s that pudding going, Mike?

Despite us both being very sluggish and under the weather this week (expected recipe count for the whole week, a rather sorry two) we haven’t taken the opportunity to try out the Hot Toddies in the Christmas chapter. Perhaps this is why it has taken us so long to recover!

Either way, I feel distinctly better this evening so on Saturday will sit down and plan out some decisive cooking action for the coming week. All is not yet lost!

I should like to remind those of you, lurking, and I know you exist, that commenting is positively encouraged. Like what you see? Let me know. I have oft likened myself to a small wet springer spaniel. Pat me on the head and my tail wags away happily!

If we’d done the challenge in a steady state, evenly along the way, our rate of recipe progress would have been 3.65 recipes per week. However, we are no longer in steady state mode. We have a big backlog. Thus, much like paying off bad credit card debt, we have to do more than the minimum per week (4) otherwise we are making things worse. And really, unless we do five or six each week, we can’t even pretend to be making head way.

Last week I tried for four recipes, and managed three (the minestrone, the sausages and polenta and the breakfast bars). The ice cream didn’t make the cut (it was simply too hot in the kitchen on Sunday night to be whipping cream) but is in the freezer now….heavens knows when we’ll eat it.

This week, not counting the ice cream, we have done one recipe. Another is coming tomorrow. We’ve essentially finished the breakfasts chapter- everything not eaten has a date set- so that means evening meals and lunches. And a target of perhaps seven. Except that I’m out on Friday and we’re out on Saturday. Oooh eck.

And yet failure doesn’t feel like an option, nor, at the moment, an inevitability. I wonder how Mike is getting on with his side of the challenges?

We now have fewer recipes left to go than we have thus far cooked. And only two months overdue!

It is not good to be sitting in nearly-mid-September and come across a recipe in Nigella Express which describes itself as ideal for a ‘weekend lunch in summer’.

Where is ma summer gone?

More to the point, where do I get a whole salmon?