In 2012, we’ve decided to tackle new ingredients.

We want to make this year about reinventing our cooking; we’ve grown comfortable with a wheelhouse of ingredients, using them the same few ways, and we want to branch out. It’s time to learn some new uses for the foods we know and love and add some fresh skills and previously unexplored items to our kitchen cabinets. This year will be about pushing the boundaries of our collective skill sets but also about getting back to basics, and that means focusing on other people’s recipes. In our opinion, trying a new recipe is the absolute best way to get outside your comfort zone and actually learn something new.

In keeping with tradition, we’ve come up with a name to our project: [Ingredient], my Soul. Each month, we’d like to showcase an ingredient, talk about its origin, history, and common uses, then bring you recipe reviews using that ingredient.

In the first week of the month, we’ll try to educate ourselves about the ingredient and share with you some of our findings.  For the rest of that month, we’ll follow up with a couple recipes that will highlight that ingredient’s use. We’ll each choose one recipe to make on our own and report back, and at least once a month we’ll both make the same recipe on our separate coasts and give you a compare and contrast post. This will give us a chance to modify the recipe by locality, get two completely different perspectives on the same dish, and hopefully have a little fun playing around with our newly bi-coastal blog.