As far as material possessions go, there are few things I love and cherish more than my cookbook collection. I never tire of pulling them out, flipping through the pages, admiring the photos, and drooling over the endless recipes I want to make. With that, I’m thrilled to announce the start of a new post series here on the site: Cookbook of the Month!
Here’s the deal:
What and When: Each month, I will select a cookbook from my collection and make recipes from it at least weekly throughout that calendar month. At the conclusion of the month, I will share a post with a review of the book overall, photos of the recipes I tried with mini-reviews, and any other relevant information. I’ll also share one recipe from the book as a concurrent food post.
How: I am purposely keeping the details of this series extremely flexible because I know that committing to X number of recipes per month from a particular book, trying to style shots of every recipe I make from it, or any other strict guideline would be the perfect way to make myself immediately lose interest and/or set myself up for failure. The goal is basically to reach for and cook from each book as much as makes sense in a given month.
Why: Probably over a year ago now, I received a reader request that I write a post about my cookbook collection. What books I owned, what I used the most, what were my favorites, etc. I loved the idea and initially planned to hammer out a post in the following week. Instead, I took my sweet time mulling over what the best approach would be, what would be most accessible and useful, and what would be actually doable for me. In this incredibly busy season of life, I realized that selecting a single book each month to focus on was a very helpful approach. It simplifies my menu planning quite a bit, and allows me to delve much deeper into each book than I normally would in a typical weekend session of flipping through pages and browsing.
Without further ado, please enjoy the first post in this series featuring Now & Again by Julia Turshen.
I hope you are as excited about this new series as I am. It’s going to be a blast! Thanks again to everyone who contacted me to let me know this monthly feature was something you would be interested in. Your feedback really helps me determine what sort of posts are worth investing my limited time and energy.