The Man and I have a lot of cookery books, I knew this. I just didn’t quite realise the scale of our collection. Every New Year I like to have a sort out and a tidy up, it helps me deal with the passing of the old year and helps me start the new one with the impression of being more organised. Today I counted the books on our cookery book shelves, yep specific cookery book shelves (I was chuffed to bits when I found our new flat had the perfect set of shelves so they could all be together in one place). Here they are … all 85 of them!!!
I find them oddly comforting books and many have memories attached to them; we pick them up on holiday, people have give them as presents, some are impulse purchases, others longed for volumes. They range from the sublime, hello Fat Duck Cookbook to the ridiculous; I’m looking at you Favourite WV Campervan Recipes ! Shamefully some have been forgotten, never cooked from and the shelves are getting taken over with all kinds of other bits and pieces.
If nothing else this is a waste of money and space, but I do think I would struggle to work out which to give away. So … for the next 85 weeks I aim to cook at least one recipe from a different each week.
Maybe by the end of this I’ll have worked out which books I can live without, (to make space for some more), but I hope it will also encourage me to try some new recipes and ingredients and add some more dishes to the list of ones we have regularly. I hope you’ll find it interesting and fun to follow. I’m sure it won’t be plain sailing and there are some interesting retro books in my collection which I’m going to have steel myself to cook from, but I did buy them!
If anyone has any ideas about how I pick where to being I’d love to hear from you? Would you start alphabetically? By date published? What do you think?
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