Happy New Year everyone! For 2012, we’ve been thinking about a new project for Garlic, My Soul. Now that we’re finally getting the hang of this bi-coastal thing, we realize that we have different ingredients available to us based on our locales, along with different taste testers along for the ride.
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 three 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.
And by the way, we would LOVE your ideas and feedback. This year, please free to challenge us to something new and exciting. We love your input and your fresh perspective, so keep those emails, comments, suggestions, challenges, and recipe requests coming!
Hopefully this challenge excites you as much as it does us – stay tuned for January, when we’re planning to kick off the year by learning about a vastly undervalued vegetable: The mighty leek.
[addtoany] Yum