So, a good couple of weeks after I decided on what I was going to write…I started. A cookbook for us seemed a good place to start, capturing the things I cook the most, so that, in time, others can cook them too.
Being something for us, it can have all my bad puns, as well as (hopefully) my bright ideas on the food front. It can celebrate where others have invented recipes, or names for dishes, as well as indicate the original source of recipes, and how they’ve been nudged in a different direction over time.
It pushes me to start thinking about quantities for things, oven temperatures and so on. How much indexing to do. (I love a well indexed cookbook. Sad but true. And indeed useful, of course.) Whether or not to go the food blogger route and take photos to accompany the dishes.
I do have another fledgling set of writings about food that I mapped out a few years back. A bit in the direction of Nigel Slater’s ‘Toast’, being food memories as much as anything else. It sits somewhere on the hard drive, being more a set of chapters rather than actually crafted prose. But it was where I had thought to begin.
Instead, begin with a task at hand. Write what is in front of you, right now. Write what seems to need to be written, right now.
At any rate, I’m enjoying tucking in.