A fresh start

Happy New Year!

I've been catching up on some blog reading. Seeing all the promises of improved blogging endeavours and new challenges being proposed got me wondering: how many new blogs get started on in January? Or how many are, like this one, resurrected, with promises of regular updates. I'm loathe to join the usual round of overly ambitious commitments made at this time of year, triggered no doubt by a combination of the irresistible fresh start offered by a new year and the feeling of overindulgence and lethargy that overtakes us at the end of the festive period.

Things kind of petered out last year.  Not so much on the cooking front, but definitely on the blogging front.  I kept on cooking, but didn't take pictures and didn't bother to write things down.  So there's quite a lot missing. For instance, Baby Bird's birthday in October featured ham and mushroom muffins and Hubby's first foray into baking, some very delicious (if a little spicy) cheese and onion muffins, both taken from The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook, along with carrot cupcakes from Cooking for Baby.  I also made two batches of cupcakes that don't strictly count as Experimental Thursday recipes, since they were adapted from loafcake recipes (lemon drizzle, taken from a recipe in Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess, and beetroot, about which I blogged earlier).  Main lesson:  I need to practice making cream cheese frosting.  You see, if I'd just taken some pics, that would have been a great blog-post right there.  Baby's Experimental Birthday.

Other highlights were a gratin of Cavolo Nero, a Bill Granger fish curry and Marcus Wareing's Pumpkin and Spinach Cannelloni.  Will have to make the last one again and take some pics this time, since it was utterly delicious and really deserves to be raved about.  It was a fiddly make, but well worth it.

So, let's see if I can do a little better this year.  No promises, but let's try.

To reinvigorate things, I'm using the New Year as a fresh start and setting myself the 52 Cookbook Challenge.  You see, I was inspecting my shelf of cookbooks a couple of weeks ago.

Yep, there they are.  There's quite a few.  Around 60 in fact.  Most are much loved.  Many are often thumbed through in quiet moments over a cup of tea.  Far too few are actually used.  Experimental Thursday was cooked up in part to remedy this, but glancing back at my forays so far, I'm mostly picking up the same one or two books.  So this year, the aim is to cook something new from a different book each week.  Hubby is very much on board this time, and appears quite excited about the 52 Cookbook Challenge.  He has been thumbing through the first book with gusto, and making a shopping list for this week's offering.  Hopefully his encouragement will be the spur I need to actually keep going, as I do enjoy writing about what I am cooking.

Will we manage all 52 weeks?  Possibly not, but let's not sweat it.  It's only a bit of fun.  Let's not write ourselves off before we start though.  We're admittedly starting a little late (this week will be an Experimental Saturday) as Baby Bird and I were away, but the Thursday aspect is hardly the most important!  Let's see what happens.