The Year We Cooked a Book

So what can I say? We're at the end of our 'challenge'. It's been fun, really fun! But I have to say that towards the end we were flagging. It almost doesn't feel like a year since we began, but we have been married for 14 months now (er...where did that time go?!) so we're a lot wiser in many ways, but especially in the cooking department.

As you will see from our last post, we sadly didn't make a few recipes. This was due to various reasons - the most predictable being time constraints. The beginning of this year just seemed to flash by, and we we had so much going on it was difficult for us to be in two nights of the week to cook together. Another one we hadn't really predicted before we started the challenge was the flavours. When we were in, we fancied something easy/comfortable - something that was a comfort food, rather than an experiment that might not work. This was definitely the case more and more as the challenge went on. I found this particularly difficult in the last season as there was a lot of meat! I do like meat, but we try to eat vegetarian and fish meals throughout the week too, and it's difficult to cope with two heavy meat dishes several nights in a row! Lastly it was a conscious decision not to pressure ourselves to 'cook the book', as it was becoming a chore. We think eating, (and therefore cooking), should not be a chore - it should be fun!

We did predictably have some difficulty sourcing ingredients too - we missed the boat on the sloes and then never got round to doing anything about it at any later stage for example.

A few triumphs were had through the winter though -
Gluten Free Puff Pastry - a first for me and beginner's luck was definitely mine! I enjoyed it so much, I made it again the next week instead of the filo pastry for the strudel. We were never going to source Gluten Free Filo (can you imagine?!) so why not use something we had already tried?
Hot Spiced Cranberry Punch was the flavour of our new year - and very nice it was too.
We never, ever, need to buy mango chutney again. We can make our own. In fact, we're planning Christmas presents already!
Oxtail is super lovely - something neither of us had ever eaten before, but it is such a good cheap cut, we vowed to use it again.

Andrew's top 5:

Vegetable Stock
Vegetable Soup with Cheesy Herb Toasts
Braised Oxtail with Beer & Red Wine
Mango Coriander & Apple Chutney
Breaded Turkey with Spinach, Walnuts & Honeyed Parsnips
Four Minute Figgy Pudding (sneaky extra!)

Rachel's Top 5:
Mango Coriander & Apple Chutney
Hot Spiced Cranberry Punch
Vegetable Soup with Cheesy Herb Toasts
Braised Oxtail with Beer & Red Wine
Christmas Pudding Ice Cream with Satsumas & Caramel Sauce

There are definitely recipes we'd do again. And there are definitely recipes we wouldn't do again...but that was the idea. We tried pretty much everything and even though we didn't do a few recipes, I don't think we can put this down as a failure. We set out what we wanted to do and did pretty well I think, in the grand scheme of things.

I thought it a funny coincidence that James Martin had his last show on Saturday Kitchen, pretty much as we finished.

One piece of advice, if you're going to cook a book - take your time choosing the book! We thought we had lots of variety, but because we wanted to cook by 'season' this meant we ended up feeling there were a lot of 'similar but different' flavours. There was a fair amount of unusual ingredients too, which were difficult to source, and sometimes - downright horrible!

It's been a fun year, cooking a book, so if we have inspired you - good luck! Otherwise, enjoy your culinary creations.