Introduction

Upon receiving four cookbooks for Christmas I decided that I should challenge myself to make as many recipes from these books as possible. My ultimate goal is to expand my culinary repertoire and actually follow recipes since I mostly experiment with my own creations at the moment. The four books I will be drawing from are: The Joy of Cooking by: Rombauer et al, Good Eats: the Early Years, Good Eats: the Middle Years and Good Eats: the Later Years, all by Alton Brown.

The Rules

At first I was just going to open each book to a random page but I thought I would become bias to certain sections once I got to know the book. As it seems to often in my day to day life Excel came to the rescue. I created a spreadsheet with randomized page numbers, this way there would be no favouritism towards sections of the books. I allowed myself +/- one page in the Joy of Cooking and +/- one episode in Good Eats so I don't have to make anything too crazy or buy really expensive ingredients (I'm kind of cheap, I am a student after all). I will try to make at least one recipe per week and share photos and feedback on how it turned out.

I must disclose that the first few recipes are not following the rules. One of the first recipes I opened to when I first got the book happened to be beef tongue. I was intrigued by it and am now committed to make it, I am just waiting for it to appear at the grocery store. I also really want to make beef bourguignon because of the colourful name my Grandma (Gran) has given it, "Beef Bugger Off."After these two, and the bread pudding below, I will be using randomly (or as close to random as Excel can get) selected recipes.

Bread Pudding

I made a loaf of cinnamon rasin bread over the holidays but for some reason it did not raise as I expected. I think the house may have been to cold for the yeast to work effectively. I baked it anyway and had myself a pretty dense loaf of bread that wasn't terrible but certainly wasn't something I would be lining up to eat. I think this is a time for new phrase, the lemon one is getting kind of tired. "When life gives you stale/old/dense bread make bread pudding." I turned to the Joy of Cooking for a recipe for this classic dessert. Overall I would say the recipe is effective, giving the bread a nice custardy consistency. It could have used more than the 3/4 cup of sugar that was called for but besides that I can't complain. One thing that the recipe says and I kind of ignored (oops!) was to remove the crusts. The crusts are far too though compared to the smooth consistency of the rest of the bread.

Here's the recipe http://www.thejoykitchen.com/recipe.lasso?recipe=1152&menu=one. The one I used was exactly the same minus the whiskey sauce.