Sunday, August 30, 2009

Another recipe created!

I have been writing a cookbook for over 30 years now. Granted, I'm not some old person yet, but this project has been sort of on-going/stagnant for most of my life. My excuse has been my "hook". Every idea I hear about could have been my own, but sadly, I didn't think of it in time. Like "Semi Homemade", or "30 minute meals", what clever ideas.... are there any ideas left? I like to cook fast, from scratch and semi homemade all combined, using what's in season. The seasons inspire me. Luckily I now live in a place where there are four very inspiring seasons. Maybe that was part of my hold up in the past, my geographical location with one year round season.

I decided to start writing a cookbook back when I was a child, tossing together crazy ingredients and coming up with some really bad concoctions... as I got older and learned to cook, mostly due to having many teenage years alone in my petting zoo environment, my creations started to take on real marketable qualities.

I spent summer after summer, not at the beach where my peers were, tanning their hides for the following school year, but in the kitchen of the little apartment that my mom and I shared. My family always had tons of cookbooks, as this preoccupation with food was no stranger to my parents, but there were three books in particular that I read thru and studied like text books. They are from Time Life, one on vegetables, one on poultry and one on meat. I learned to carve and chop and makes sauces... while my mom was at work, I was home trying out a new technique or recipe. My other favorite go-to book was a paperback Betty Crocker book, I still have it, all held together with rubber bands. It had the best cooking charts for meat and you could find anything in that book. That was like my cooking bible.

As I gained knowledge, I started getting more creative too. Pretty soon I was figuring out ways to change recipes to make them better. There is always a better way.

Meanwhile, 30+ years later the whole nation has become as enamored with cooking as I always have been. The TV and bookstores are flooded with cooks and cookbooks.

There being my dilemma, what makes my book unique? It's going to be filled with wonderful recipes I've already created, some unique, some improved classics.

So, I've decided that while I wait for my magical "hook" to appear in a dream or on hairball stain from my lovely cat Lily, I should plug forward and create more recipes to add to an already quite impressive collection.

Last week I created a wonderful grilled corn and black bean salad with a surprise ingredient (no, nothing disgusting from my cat or dog, lol) And today, I created a Chilled Cucumber Soup... while I was creating this one, I discovered I was missing an ingredient that would have made it perfect. You never know what you need while you are at the store, only when you are home creating, my kitchen is probably as well stocked as any great chefs, but darn, I was missing that one thing! So, I will be redoing that recipe again maybe next week.

I still have those books, by the way, and many many more. Besides loving to cook, I'm a cookbook junkie too. My cookbooks have a room of their own!

So, this is my journey to finishing up my decades old dream to write a best selling, must have, cookbook! I figure it's like writing any book, you need to write a little everyday, and it will materialize into something real, right? So I need to create a little something everyday to see what direction my ideas lead me.