The arrival of the first big bag of rainbow chard in last week's veg box gave me pause for thought. Could it really be a year since I ordered that first box? And could it really be a year since I tried to institute Experimental Thursday and began this blog? Surely not. But a quick look here confirmed that indeed it was and, more importantly, it was also a very long time since I had written here at all.
I don't intend to apologise - it's been a busy year and since I'm writing this for myself rather than anyone else (and noone's really read it anyway), all I intend to say to myself is "Life has been busy this year and blogging is meant to be fun, not a chore". What did make me a little sad though was the realisation that our second attempt at ET, which we kicked off in the New Year, lasted a lot longer than the blog suggests as we definitely made it all the way through February and a little way through March too. Not covered here are such treats as Upside-Down Vegetable Cake from Leith's Vegetarian Bible, a Morrocan vegetable tagine served with giant couscous, which I sort of invented myself, and Ina Garten's fruit soda bread (all of which were delicious) and then the surprisingly disappointing Eli's Asian Salmon from the same book, which I did with orange-honey glazed carrots and noodles. It all sounded great in theory but didn't quite work in practice. There was also the wonderful sweet corn and salmon chowder from Cooking for Baby and the tasty corn and red pepper muffins from Kitchen Classics: Soups and Breads, the lovely Battered Amritsari Sole from Anjum's New Indian and a very tasty Marzipan Fruit Cake that Baby Bird and I made for Daddy's birthday at the start of March. That was lots of fun although I can confirm that marzipan is very hard to wash out of a toddler's hair and you should never leave them playing with the mixing bowl while you turn round to pop a cake in the oven!
Later in the year, the idea has occasionally resurfaced and we've had a random little experiment. We've made homemade pizzas with the help of Linda McCartney, something which has become a family favourite, and have also tried out Valentine Warner's langoustine risotto and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's roasted squash with shallots and merguez chickpeas (the latter proving more popular than the former) and just the other week I tried out a couple of really tasty courgette tarts, one with tomatoes and the other with ricotta.
It's a shame the stories that went with the recipes have largely been lost as so many day-to-day moments are. Still, there's a few pics to mark these simple meals and if this is the worst thing I can thing of in my life to complain about, things really are pretty great.
However, standing in the kitchen, wondering what to do with that bag of chard, I did think that it might be nice to come back here and start up again. Maybe it will be third time lucky? We certainly cook more adventurously now than we did a year ago, so in one sense, Experimental Thursday has been a great success, even if we did not manage to maintain the discipline necessary to make and write about something every week. What we have done has been fun though, and it's time once more to come up with something interesting to do with chard. So let's step into this new season with renewed purpose and see what happens.
