Over the course of lockdown we vastly elevated our cooking game (covered in an earlier post), and proceeded to cook 98 consecutive dinners and lunches from the Marcus Wareing cookbooks, which probably also explains why we packed on about 20 kg during lockdown.
We’ve also saved loads of recipes from our various dalliances with meal delivery companies, such as Hello Fresh, Gousto, and the amazing Mindful Chef. Inevitably you have your favourites – but it’s nice to have some awareness of which ones are really getting a workout.
In order to keep track of which recipes we cooked before and when, I started noting on the pages/cards what date I cooked them. We also developed a ranking system – a star means something to definitely make again. Two stars marks the dish out as a bulletproof classic for the ages.
And seeing as I’d already written on them, it made sense to start writing notes about the recipe if there were suggested improvements for next time.
Or any sort of feedback really.
Looking back on some of the notes they seem a bit obvious – but there are times when you read the recipe and then try to optimise/work out what can be done to get the whole thing out quicker.
Some lend themselves to more editorial content.
And then of course there’s the inevitable need to protect our forgetful future selves from making poor choices.
Nobody’s gonna be buying these books off us secondhand anyway.
