A New Cooking Blog Project . . .

Yes, here we go again.

I recall swearing off food blog projects after finishing working my way through 'The Essentials of Italian Cooking' in the spring. It takes steely discipline to cook and blog week in and week out as you work through a cook book. Imagine my happiness when Deborah contacted me to see if I wanted to join her for another walk through fire and thorns.

To make this blog challenge even more appealing - we had to create our own recipes. ARGH

Sign me up.  

The more I thought about it through the more interesting it seemed. The book we were to use as our guide is called The Flavor (sorry Brits and Canadians - those colonists and their refusal to use the Queen's proper English) Bible by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg.

The Flavor Bible reads like a dictionary. An alphabetical list of ingredients is accompanied by very few photos and fewer entire sentences. What remains is several categories of information for you to launch into your own creativity and desire. Most ingredients list:

• Season
• Taste
• Botanical Relatives
• Weight, volume (descriptions not measurements – i.e. heavy, light)
• Tips
• A list of ingredients to pair it with (strong pairings are indicated in bold and all caps)
• Flavour affinities (recipes without measurements – highlights combos of other flavours that come together with this ingredient

Now this started to sound exciting. I've always wanted to learn more about why some foods just seem to work in combination and others didn't. Now, courtesy of Deborah, I'd have a chance to discover and play with this myself.

The challenge works like this - 52 flavors were selected - one for each week of the upcoming year. The seven Flavor Bloggers had to develop a recipe that uses some of the compatible ingredients in it and post it on 'their' day. My day is Saturday.

I am interested to see what the participants come up with - for the first week the key ingredient was plums. So far there are recipes for a plum tart, plum filled steamed buns, a plum salad, salmon with plum relish,  plum flatbread, and a plum clafoutis. Such great variety!

You can follow long on the Flavor Blog as we work our way through the next year.

Comments

[bellini]

It sounds like an exciting project Jerry, and I do understand about spelling of words like flavour. I will hold on to our way of thinking for as long as possible:D I fought for spelling throughout my daughters school years when she was told words like axe, was spelled ax and I don't even know how they spell ploughman:D

[nancyhol]

I think this sounds like a very educational endeavor.

I got my book yesterday, so I am going to follow along and make a few of the dishes too.

[Kathryn Gerth]

This sounds challenging...and wonderful! I put the blog in my Google Reader and will follow along, don't know that I am brave enough, or experienced enough, to dream up my own recipes to participate as a reader leaving a connect, but it is certainly tempting. Like I need another blog-along, right? lol Looking forward to seeing what you all make this next year.

[JDeQ]

It should be interested . . . and more challenging then any of us thought . . .