A girl and her cookbooks - A love story

We all have our vices...

Yes. I'm addicted to buying recipe books.

*hangs head in shame*

This isn't even all of them. These are just my favourites. There are at least 10 still at my parents. And I found one of two more after I took this photo. OH and one of them is Phil's. But I bought it for him. And we live together. So it's basically mine now.

The worst part is I don't even use them all.

I get so so so so excited to buy them. Or ask for them for birthdays. Or beg for them.

And when they arrive I read through them like novels. 

I leave them on the coffee table. I leaf through them while I'm lounging on the sofa.

I write a list of my favourite recipes for my "Things I want to cook" note.

And then I take them upstairs and put them on the shelf.

And go back to Pinterest and the thousands of food blogs I read.

There are a few books here I haven't even cooked from yet.

THE SHAME. THE SHAME.

It's not like I don't cook. I cook almost every day. Sometimes twice, or three times a day at the weekend (sometimes even more than that). 

But as I mentioned in my last post, I cook from food blogs. From Pinterest. From the goldmine that is BBC Good Food.

I make excuses.

Too many complicated ingredients. I can't buy that in Aldi. Pine nuts are too expensive.

That will take too long. Phil doesn't like sweetcorn. I don't have room for more jars of spices.

This post is two-fold.

One, to shame me and my book buying habit. Fuelled by nearly preordering Anna Jones' new cookbook despite having only made one recipe from A Modern Way To Eat, which I only bought three weeks ago.

And the other is to inspire me. To inspire me by all the wonderful, gorgeous books that I already have.

And to set myself a challenge.

I have to make something from one of my physical books once a week.

That's not to say I can't cook from Pinterest and food blogs the other 20 meals of the week.

But at least one meal per week has to come from one of the books I already have.

Maybe I'll blog about it. Maybe I won't.

I'm sure you'll see some of the results, and disasters, on Instagram at least.

To get started, I picked out a few favourite cookbooks. Then a few more. Then just a few more that I'd forgotten about.

Then realised that more than half of my books were favourites. Never mind. Moving on.

Then I got out my notebook. And started to work through each book.

In just the first three that I went through there were 26 new-to-me recipes I wanted to make straight away (I didn't write down anything I'd already made). And that's only from 3 books! And I have 32!

I'm sure there will be meltdowns. There will be tears. There will undoubtedly be tantrums in Tesco and disappointment in Aldi.

But maybe if I stick to this I can feel better about my piles of recipe books.

Or at least, you know, not feel guilty when I undoubtedly pre-order Anna Jones' new book...