A rant about having too much food porn

Being the proud owner of over sixty cookbooks, at least one of which I have used on occasion, and as a keen subscriber to several cookery magazines, which are great for bedtime reading, my new year resolution for 2011 was to cook something new every day. Ambitious as I was expecting a baby in March, but hey.

I have to say I enjoy cooking, and cook every day, from scratch. But I am more of the haphazard, shove everything in a pot and see what comes out after applying heat for a while type of cook. I'll go to a restaurant and try and replicate what I have eaten at home. I'm sure my husband will never forget my attempt at bouillabaisse, but not quite for the right reasons. I have also picked up a lot from the "watch and learn" school of cooking. My French mother in law has been a great source of ideas, which almost compensates for, erm, other issues.

But in December last year I looked at my beautiful if unused collection of cookbooks and magazines and decided it was time I learned to cook according to the book. Hence the rather ambitious resolution.

On January 3rd I revised my resolution to once a week. I would cook something new, following a recipe, once a week. And on 28th January I started to plan my first new meal: steak and ale pie. Something nice and traditional, good filling winter food. With a bit of luck I could use something from one of the books my mother had given me, so I could finally say I had put her gift to work.

I looked at my shelves and started taking down the books one by one. It is incredible how many recipes there are for steak pie, and they all manage to be slightly different. One can really spend hours finding the recipe which suits one's skills and available ingredients. Most of them involve slow cooking beef, and I was worried that my hours of research and cooking would be a disappointment. So I put the recipes back on the shelf and turned to Chef Google. The beauty of internet recipe sites is that there is often a space for comments after recipes, where people who have tried and tested leave their remarks and suggestions.

Of course Google is quite distracting, and I am sure I hardly need to say that I spent several days before finally selecting a recipe which had good reviews, buying the ingredients, and cooking the pie. So, on the 12th of February I baked a delicious steak and Guinness pie, the recipe for which I had found on Jamie Oliver's website. I was surprised  that I hadn't found it in one of my cookbooks because I of course have all of Jamie's books. Who doesn't? They are all so readable, and the recipes do look wonderful. It was in the one Jamie book I hadn't looked at.

In March I re-revised my resolution to once a month. I would use one of my recipes once a month, and in May, while recovering, I successfully cooked the Tomato and Basil soup from Prue Leith's Cookery Bible. My two successes made me take recipes a lot more seriously - maybe my haphazard methods weren't the best solution. In July I followed up with a third success, Joanne Harris's French Onion Soup.

I was, however, wracked with guilt that yet another New Year Resolution had gone to pot. Three recipes in seven months was not the intended three hundred and sixty five, or the revised fifty two recipes I had intended to cover. In fact even doing twelve and later pretending I had done one a month was going to be difficult at this rate. My problem was finding recipes with so much choice. I needed a new system whereby I would be able to immediately find any recipe based on a key ingredient. Yes, all my recipes needed to be catalogued.

I have since been taking every book and magazine, one by one, deciding which recipes I could, feasibly, possibly attempt. I have devised a beautiful Excel spreadsheet, which is colour coded, you will be pleased to know, and can sort the recipes by book, key ingredient and type of  dish. It has taken me months. I just need to add the recipes from the books I received for Christmas, and I will be ready to start on my New Year Resolution 2012. I don't think I need to tell you what that is.