On choosing a project

Welcome to the Sara-Simon project. No, really; you're welcome here, all 1 of you, to watch as a famously terrible cook (with a 5-star chef sister, someone had to have the corresponding lack of talent) attempts to interprets recipes from a reasonably well known cookbook. Ah yes, but you've heard it all before: the Julie-Julia project, with its blog and book and wonderfully crazy writer who makes me feel sane by comparison (which is no mean feat, as you may later discover). And this blog is unashamedly derivative. Not because I want to become another Julie, famous, feted, yadda, yadda, but because the basic idea of learning to cook everything including the yukky and difficult bits, with no excusing excuses, really appeals.

A little background, then enough about me; my much-cherised partner (aka he who sometimes gets obeyed) is an excellent cook. Puts meals together from scratch everyday, wouldn't recognise a packet meal even if he did happen to stray from the fresh section of the local supermarket (and buys as much as he can at the local market) and understands the true meaning of words like reduce and blanche; in short, a complete kitchen saint, of the kind normally found in France in the 1950s. Me, I start most meals with a tinopener, have a detailed knowledge of asian packet foods and usually eat whatever I've put in the fridge, often without bothering to put it together in any catering sense other than 'on the same plate'. So with his usual didactic patience, hwsgo has been sending me a recipe to cook every week for the last 6 (or is it 8?) months. Which has been a great deal of fun, especially the recipe when I was travelling on Eurostar that started with 'obtain bag of nuts; order champagne'; and since we live some distance apart, I love the connection of cooking with him by proxy.

And then he bought me the Julie/Julia book, and I started to wonder "could I do that?". "Should I". So here I am. And enough about me; on with the food...