Many of you might have followed the last cooking adventure I participated in, which was Pomodori E Vino. For that challenge, we cooked our way through Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. It was a great project, and I learned a lot about Italian cooking. But when we were through, I was ready for it to be over. I was tired of having to cook a recipe each week, whether it sounded good to me or not. One of our rules was we had to follow the recipe exactly as written. And because they weren’t our recipes or adaptations of them, we didn’t post the recipes. A lot of blog readers really missed that.
After several months of not having any challenges, I began to miss a cooking project. Deborah, the orginal creator of Pomodori E Vino, asked if I was interested in starting something new. We tossed around ideas, and Deborah came up with the suggestion that we use The Flavor Bible, by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, as the base of our blog challenge. We recruited 5 other participants, one for every day of the week. And the challenge just began today.
The idea behind The Flavor Bible was to study the way flavors were being combined. They interviewed many many chefs, discussing with them flavor combinations. The book is not a cookbook. It is more of a reference guide. There are over 600 ingredients listed, with the most compatable flavors also listed. The matching flavors are in BOLD CAPS if they were very highly recommended by a lot of experts, and in bold if they were recommended by a number of experts. Abd the flavors in regular type were suggested by one or more experts.
Our rules for this blog were that we would run the blog for 1 year, or 52 weeks. Each week one ingredient will be the theme. Then each of us 7 participants have to create a recipe using at least one bolded capped ingredient, one bolded, and at least one other ingredient of our choice. While there’s very little that’s never been created before, these were to be mainly our own creations. No looking up a recipe and just changing a couple of things to make it your own. We would then post our recipe on our “given” day.
I will be posting my recipes each Monday. You’ll find those recipes here on my blog. But if you’d like to follow along for the entire blog, go to Flavors. I think you’ll enjoy following along. And if you like to cook and have a blog, think about buying the book and cooking along with us. Make your recipe and post it on your blog, then come to the the Flavors blog and leave a message about your creation and leave a link to your blog. It would be fun to see what everyone comes up with.