To new beginnings

Colin and I were inspired by Julia & Julia's story, where the girl cooked through Julia Child's cookbook at the pace of one recipe a day. We wanted to do something similar, but not at such a hectic pace, with Eleven Madison Park's cookbook. Today, Colin and I are getting serious about our culinary undertaking by tracking down all the esoteric ingredients and equipment, and studying the cookbook for the upcoming batch of recipes.

The book is organized by seasons, and as it is now November, we flipped to the Autumn section and chose to focus on 4 seafood dishes (see Recipes on Deck for the items we are planning to attack). Our plan is to aim for one new recipe every week, assuming that Colin, hunter extraordinaire, can procure all the items needed in each recipe.

We expected that some things needed in the menus would be a little hard to find, a little expensive, and that we'll eventually end up with a lot of random kitchen equipment. Boy, did we get a reality check when Colin pointed out that we need to buy a "sous vide" immersion circular cooker - cheapest one on Amazon.com topped out at a mere $300! It looks like we can't escape it - many of the recipes in this book require its use, so hopefully we will fall in love with this cooking technique and use it even after we finish cooking with this book.

I can't wait to channel my inner artiste and start painting with sauces!