Home Cooking

I made a New Year's resolution to cook at home more often. Restaurants are expensive. Also, it's lopsided to neglect the craft of cooking for the fun of eating. A gourmand should explore both, as each enhances the other; and in fact if there's going to be any imbalance, it should fall the opposite way. It's like being a musician, and how seeing a great concert makes you want to run home and pick up your guitar.

To build inspiration for cooking, I adopted a goal of trying one new recipe every two weeks. Even odds whether I'll have forgotten that by March, but at least for now it's a good way to get jazzed. I have plenty of cookbooks with simple, promising recipes lurking within. Not every experiment will be scuba-diving into The French Laundry Cookbook, although who's to say what the year may bring.

It's been five years since I wrote on this site regularly, and back then I wrote for my own purposes. That much hasn't changed. I'm publishing notes about this resolution because I think it might be fun to read back through later, and because if I'm going to write at all, it's important that I keep myself in the habit of writing for an audience. But no promises about whether I'll update frequently, regularly, or even again. For whatever reason—in part, because several friends have started blogs recently—the idea struck me and we'll see how long it lasts.

I'm looking forward to trying some new recipes. I have ideas about ones I'd like to try, and I'm looking forward to discovering more. In the meantime, here are a few of the cookbooks that I have relied on in my kitchen. These will probably be heavily represented. Saving money is definitely part of my goal; this resolution won't turn into an excuse to buy more cookbooks.

• Cook's Illustrated, The Best Recipe
• Marcella Hazan, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
• Christopher Kimball, The Yellow Farmhouse Cookbook
• Joel Robuchon, The Complete Robuchon
• Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food

Those are my favorites from three shelves' worth. I also have several confectionary cookbooks that might make appearances. After all, this is a New Year's resolution with economic and informational motives. It isn't health-related. Maybe next year I'll need to lose 20 pounds.