Introduction to Cooking the Whole Cookbook

I have been thinking about this project for a few months now but wanted to start it after I finished the big mosaic project I was working on.

My inspiration comes from the Julie and Julia memoir my friend Julia (no relation to either Julie or Julia) gave me since she knows how much I love to cook. For those who have not yet come across this memoir, Julie and Julia chronicles a year of Julie Powell cooking EVERY SINGLE RECIPE in Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Childs in one calendar year.

I like the idea of cooking every recipe in a cookbook, of really becoming intimate with one person’s tastes and pursuits, but I don’t like the idea of purposely torturing myself with aspic and goat’s head or what have you. I wanted to enjoy what I was about to do; I wanted to inspire others to cook and give critiques on the recipes. Most cookbooks I own offer little inspiration than a couple of interesting recipes mixed in with a lot of filler. I wanted to cook good food from a good, simple cookbook.

And then The Splendid Table’s How to Eat Supper by Lynne Rosetto Kaspar and Sally Swift came out. The Splendid Table is a public radio cooking show that I adore and most of the recipes discussed on the show are doable and tasty to boot. My husband and I were invited to a private party in Seattle sponsored by our local public radio station (KUOW) where we got to eat some of the food from the book, hear Lynne herself speak, and as a little added bonus, we also received a signed copy of the book.

I had finally found my cookbook.

So for no special reason than perhaps it hit 92 degrees F today, I decided to turn on the oven this evening and start my quest to cook everything and all of it’s variations in How to Eat Supper. This cookbook doesn’t have half the recipes as the French cooking book has, so a year would be too long to loiter and dilly-dally.

This book has approximately 182 recipes, but there are so many variations I am not sure I made an exact count. I will not know how many there really are until I declare myself finished. ALSO, I want to have a little buffer in case I screw up a recipe and I want to do a do-over. I don’t want to race through these and learn how to make them badly.

So I am giving myself until Thanksgiving. 5 months. That is just a little over one recipe per day, which isn’t the most stressful schedule but will allow me time to cook some of the recipes a couple of times. And for the finale, I will pick my favorite recipes from the cookbook to recreate on Thanksgiving Day, my favorite holiday.