Challenge within a challenge: Too many cooks

Any friends or family of mine will know that Aussie Masterchef is my favourite show. I talk about it so much I reckon I’d do a good job of doing their PR in the UK. But this post isn’t about the show.

I was in Milton Keynes before Christmas and bought the Covent Garden Soup cookbook for a bargain price of £5 (the original price was £25.) It had 365 soup recipes and looking through all of them some were just bizarre. Talking with my friends Ann Marie and Kayleigh about recipe books we agreed that there aren’t that many that you cook a lot of recipes from. One or two from each and there are a few when it’s several more. For me I've got two recipe books where I've made multiple recipes; the famous orange covered student cookbook and Jamie Oliver’s money saving cookbook.

So I thought about setting myself a challenge, to cook all the recipes I have in my cookbooks. It took quite a while to record exactly how many recipes and cookbooks I have. There are 5733 recipes spread over 30 recipe books. I'm sure there are many duplicate recipes for the same dish, but it will be interesting to see what recipe is the best in those cases. Before the ‘challenge’ begun I had cooked 57 of the recipes.

I'm not going to put a deadline on this challenge. It’s not going to be like the film Julie & Julia where I have to cook a recipe book in a year. I just hope I won’t have any cooking disasters like below, when I burnt a cake after not turning the oven down after pre heating it.