Month: September 2018

So I’ve set myself a little challenge and imaginatively called it Cookbook Challenge. Hopefully this will encourage me to try out new recipes. I’ll also learn to adapt recipes when I just can’t get hold of the necessary ingredients.

A little bit of background first:

6 months ago my husband and I moved from East Yorkshire to the Isle of Skye off the North-west coast of Scotland. Thinking back to March 2018 and the “Beast from the East”, snow, winds, freezing temperatures, then that was the week we moved our world nearly 500 miles. Not without it’s challenges but we were living our dream.

So post-Christmas 2017 the packing started and wow did we own some stuff. We had an exact amount of space on the removals truck, any more and it wasn’t going to fit. We’d been in our house in Wetwang for 12 years, running two businesses and amassing a lot of clutter. It was very therapeutic sorting through things, throwing them away, recycling and donating, but the actual packing had to start at some point.

Decision made, I would sort through and pack books first. We had collected nearly two bookcases of cookbooks since we first set up house together 22 years ago. We had cookbooks we never used, never were going to use and really didn’t need. Now I love books, I always had hundreds of reading books as a child, and I don’t exaggerate. When I moved out of my parents home after University I took half a dozen wooden tea chests out of their loft, full of all my books. But this time I couldn’t take everything, so I had to be cruel to be kind.

I managed to whittle the books down to ones I use all the time, ones I use from time to time, ones I love to look through for inspiration and ones I really want to start to use. The rest really had to go. Fortuitously our Village Hall had a weekly book swap and was also hosting a Jumble Sale so they did very well from my clear out. All the rest have made it to Skye and I have no regrets.

Fast forward to now…

Last weekend I had to empty the bookcase in the kitchen where I keep all the cookbooks to do some DIY. As the books sat piled up on the kitchen table I kept looking at them and pondering. Maybe I should challenge myself to cook a few new things, maybe I should dare to try a few new recipes. It’s very easy to get stuck in a rut. Whilst thumbing through a few pages with a cup of tea in hand I came up with Cookbook Challenge.

The Cookbook Challenge…

So I have challenged myself to pick up each and every book, choose a recipe and cook it. Sounds simple right? Maybe, maybe not! There are cookbooks old and new, traditional and modern, celebrity and very much not celebrity, books I’ve bought, books I’ve been given, books I’ve inherited, you get the idea. Some books are way out of my comfort zone and others are well thumbed.

It might be one recipe a week, some times more, other weeks may go by without a Cookbook Challenge happening. Either way I will give this a crack, learning new things along the way…

Each time I complete a Cookbook Challenge recipe I’ll write it up whether the result is good or bad. I’ll also be very honest about how accurately I managed to follow the recipe. One big challenge I have here on Skye is availability of ingredients. We only have 3 supermarkets on the island and they are all fairly small and all owned by the Co-op. Nothing wrong with the Co-op but if they don’t have what I need it can be a struggle. For time to time I use Amazon Pantry. On trips onto the mainland I dive in large supermarkets to stock up the pantry but groceries can be a challenge.

So here goes…my Cookbook Challenge!