The Resolution...

Recently I've acquired as gifts two new cookbooks: Veganomicon: the Ultimate Vegan Cookbook by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero as well as How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food by Mark Bittman. Both are tomes among cookbooks. I fell in love with the Veganomicon while visiting friends in New York; so many fabulous-sounding recipes! The Bittman book was a gift from Paul's grandmother who learned about it in a Fresh Air interview with Mark Bittman.

I think that it was the overwhelming urge to cook everything in the Veganomicon that drove me to reflect on my previous relationships with cookbooks. I owe my love of cooking to growing up watching PBS. Actually, being an avid PBS-watcher as a small child accounts for a lot of my hobbies: woodworking, gardening, home-improvement to name a few. My first excursions into the world of cooking were heavily influenced by my favorite shows: The Frugal Gourmet with Jeff Smith, The French Chef with Julia Child, and Yan Can Cook with Martin Yan. The most important thing that I learned from these shows was to be fearless with food. By the age of eleven I started cooking for myself and occasionally for my family as well. I made the choice to become a vegetarian and I didn't want to sacrifice my love of food. I started heavily modifying recipes to make them fit my new food choices. I became an adventurous cook. Having very little actual cooking experience, I relied on my visual experience watching those shows on PBS. My choices in cookbooks were heavily influenced by those visual experiences. I chose cookbooks with large color photography that in today's blogiverse we call "food porn". But the recipes hardly ever lived up to the fantasy and I started using cookbooks with pretty pictures as inspiration only and making up my own dishes that matched the flavors that my imagination tasted in the pictures.

It wasn't until recently that I started following other people's recipes faithfully. A few years ago I met a vegan housewife who actually managed to make menu plans and shopping lists, and she introduced me to Veggie Life Magazine. My mother, like most other women I knew did her shopping based on a rough estimate of what her family needed for the week and whatever else "looked good". Sometimes that meant that things didn't get used in time and wilted or spoiled, sometimes it meant that we didn't have all of the ingredients we needed for a particular dish and had to run out to the store again during the week. I inherited this pattern of shopping behavior, until I made friends with this vegan housewife who made shopping lists. I subscribed to VeggieLife Magazine and started building menu plans and shopping lists around each new issue. This renewed my faith in other people's recipes and my faith in new ingredients.

Two years ago Paul and I embarked on a major home renovation, choosing to do as much of the work ourselves as possible. For the better part of the past two years I have survived on a limited budget and without a kitchen. The crockpot and toaster oven have been my friends. Now I have a working kitchen with brand-spanking-new appliances. I have more time to cook, and the Veganomicon has renewed my interest in following other people's recipes. I want to be an artist with food, and one of the principles of The Artist's Way is the need to continually replenish the well from which we draw our inspiration. It is my resolution this year to work my way through as many recipes in my cookbook collection as possible starting with the Veganomicon. I'm not going to use a recipe for every meal, and I'm not goig to refrain from improvising or cooking old favorites, but each week I will chose a handful or recipes from one of my cookbooks and blog about them.