One of the small things I was most excited about when we moved into this house was having a cookbook shelf actually in the kitchen. Now I would truly have everything.

So naturally the first thing I did after moving in was start working more overtime, and cooking less. The books at least, had a place to sit and wait.

At some point over the summer, pining for normalcy, intoxicated by the thought that to achieve it, we just had to believe, Rodrigue established a new house rule: once a week, we cook one recipe from a cookbook we already own.

Obviously we didn’t do it that week and haven’t done it since. Obviously.

Apart from the overwork reason, a few more important obstacles stand in our way:

1) When I cook, I cook randomly using whatever ingredients are going to go bad next, or challenging myself to figure out a meal I can make without opening the fridge or going to the store.

2) Rodrigue cooks exclusively with recipes but he uses a brand new recipe he googles every single time he cooks. If he makes apple pancakes five Saturdays in a row, we are eating five different apple pancake recipes. SEO determines what we have for breakfast.

3) New cookbooks are pretty. And pretty aggressive. Sometimes they just charge the front door of the apartment and fling themselves upstairs onto that shelf. The stack keeps growing.

Still, it seems like a pretty nice idea. So I’m going to cook from the cookbooks I have (and probably the ones that attack me on the sidewalk and come in on the cuffs of my pants like ticks), and perhaps I’ll note what happens when I cook from the cookbooks, here.

The post What if we actually COOKED FROM our cookbooks? appeared first on Jill Murray.