The ‘Cover to Cover Cooking’ Experiment

Exciting news – My very good friend Jacquie is going to join me in blogging! Together we are starting a great experiment in which we will attempt to cook one cookbook cover to cover, every last recipie.

Why? Well, The reasoning is twofold: (1) to explore some healthy vegetarian cooking, and (2)to force us to use one of the beautiful wonderful cookbooks that are cluttering up our cupboards.

You see, while I have been a vegetarian for 6(ish?) years now, Jacquie has just been (gently) coerced into a mostly veggie lifestyle by her newly vegetarian husband (and all her cool-est vegetarian friends from college). Jacquie and I were discussing this when I was visiting her, flipping through the cookbooks she has.  The exchange may or may not have went something like this:

Denise: “Jacquie, this barbeque cookbook isn’t very vegetarian friendly.”

Jacquie: “It was a gift. But, there are vegetables!”

Denise proceeds to look at page 226 – 227 or something that holds the entire vegetable section.  Mostly she learns you can grill your onions before you put it on your burger. Innovation!

Jacquie: “I never use them anyhow, but the pictures are amazing.”

Denise: “Yeah, the Google machine always tells me what to cook, despite having tons of legit cookbooks.” Denise hides barbeque cookbook under charcoal on the grill. “You know I always wanted to just pick a cookbook and cook the whole thing.”

Jacquie: “Me too.”

Being the nice person she is, Jacquie took this to mean cooking all the recipes in the cookbook, instead of literally barbequing the whole barbeque cookbook. We picked out Hedi Swanson’s “Super natural every day” because of the sneaky way the book is vegetarian friendly without ever pointing it out, and the wonderful images of the food inside.

Of note, before we start I wanted to say that I REALLY do NOT want to infringe on Ms. Swanson’s copyright. We love the cookbook, and both own it, and will over the course of the next month (or two, or three?) determine if we will recommend to everyone we have ever met. This morning I took to reading recipe copyright articles & law, and have come up with the ground rules. We can list ingredients, but not her procedures. We can of course list any of our witty/insight commentary. We will always credit her cookbook, and help assist you in finding it for sale at you local bookstore/mass-market amazon bookstore.

Now let’s start some natural vegetarian cooking!