Thoughts on the cookbook_challenge

[tielan]

I'm pretty terrible at following recipes. I'll take the elements of a recipe and approximate amounts, or turn it into a pie or a pastie, or use pasta instead of rice, or replace a herb in the recipe. That said, I have a fairly extensive pantry when it comes to little bits and pieces. The trick is - as always - using up what I have before it all goes off.

Also, I have a crazy number of cookbooks. Some inherited from my mum and stepdad, some...acquired by mysterious means of IDEK.

And this isn't even half of them!

Anyway, I'm going to make a monthly post with ideas, then refer back to it. There will be far more recipes in the post than I plan to make, but hopefully that'll make it easier for me to find recipes I like the idea of in the months either side of the specific month.

Finally, an interesting thing that I've discovered: Australian cookbooks are not big on corn. As in, corn is rarely an ingredient, although it's a commonly-referenced accompaniment to, for instance, BBQs. I imagine that it's much much bigger in, say, the US...

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

Well, first of all, corn is native to America, so not something the British would have brought as colonizers.

Second, part of the reason the US puts corn in EVERYTHING (and the reason our cows are fed corn, and the reason for the development of High Fructose Corn Syrup as the main sweetener) is because, thanks to stupid legislation a century ago and the fact that every time the situation has come up politicians have chosen to extend or reinforce the stupidity rather than fix it, we subsidize corn production to such an insane degree that we have for about 80 years or so produced FAR more corn than we could possibly use before it goes bad.

Corn is, therefore, always available and always fairly cheap.

[tielan]

Well, just about everything we eat is non-native to Australia, and there are plenty of things that we eat that the British didn't bring. Our diet is considerably more varied than Brits, partly because the range of climates in the country mean just about anything can be grown at some time of year with even just a little tweaking by microcrlimate.

Mangoes, for instance, are huge stuff in Australia come summer - neither native to the country, nor common in the UK. And corn is available all year round; it's just not an ingredient that it seems the cookbooks try to integrate into recipe.

I can definitely see how the US would always have corn available, though.

[jenab]

I have all of my mom's cookbooks now and I have quite the collection. It's been interesting to go through them because some of them are over 50 years old.

[tielan]

We had an old old cookbook from, hm, the 70s? We can't find it anymore! It was CLASSIC!

My mum had a handwritten book of recipes from aeons ago. I typed up and printed out a lot of the recipes and have had them in folders for some years. Time to dig those out, too...

[eggsbenedict]

Ohh, I just realised one of these might be one I lent you and totally forgot about! (It's not like I missed it, haha.) Did I lend you the other allergy-friendly cookbook as well?

[tielan]

Yes! The Friendly Food one is yours. It was helpful at the time!

I think you might have loaned me another, but I have a feeling I returned it. Do you remember the name?

[eggsbenedict]

I can't remember the name at all - I vaguely remember the cover but Googling isn't getting me anywhere! I may have lent it to someone else. I'll let you know if I remember what the title...

[wpadmirer]

Do you know conuly? She's doing some kind of cookbook, recipe thing with others for the new year. You might enjoy that.

And yes, corn is very commonly used in the USA in recipes. It's astounding the things that people will put corn in.

[tielan]

That would be the cookbook_challenge, yes. :)

[wpadmirer]

Cool. Just wanted to be sure since you're both into the cooking thing.