Apricots In Manchester

Cookbook Challenge reboot

Are you a recipe book collector like me? How often do you actually use your cookbooks ?

In 2019 I started a project to try and cook a meal from every recipe book I own. It was fun and I managed twelve meals from different books. I think that was a pretty good effort, although it was still only a small part of my collection.

You can read a bit more about why I originally started this in this post: Cookbook Challenge Introduction

After 2019, life got in the way and I stopped blogging. Work, a global pandemic and a bereavement all limited my ability to focus.

A couple of weeks ago I suddenly had the urge to log into the blog again. It didn’t look too bad, so since I was there I thought I may as well carry on. This time I have an even bigger collection of books, some of them bought for me with the expectation that I might actually cook something and write about it. I have a new kitchen too, with more fridge and oven space, some pan drawers and a fancy tap.

The first decision was which book to cook from. I was thinking of using one I recently inherited from my Mum, but seeing her notes in the margins was too much. I’ll come back to those another time. Instead I picked this book, mainly because of the colourful cover which I hadn’t opened for some time.

Years ago at Avebury in Wiltshire, just next to the famous stone circle, there was a vegetarian restaurant that served the kind of substantial vegetarian dishes popular in the nineties. This was when vegan meat substitutes and Quorn were still niche products. You could get soya mince and veggie burgers, but most vegetarian meals were made up of, well, vegetables, maybe some cheese, and bulked up with plenty of carbs.

The restaurant owners published three books as far as I know, all out of print now. This one is from 1995. The restaurant closed in 2000 but the building is now a cafe serving coffee, cakes and light lunches for the stone circle visitors.

If you’ve never been to Avebury, you should. It’s better than Stonehenge I think – bigger and you can wander amongst the stones and even touch them if you like. The photo is from what must have originally been a long avenue leading to the circle. Even with crowds of visitors (out of shot here), it’s dramatic and mysterious.

Oh yes, I have to write about what I actually cooked – follow along for the update!

Will you be inspired to use your cookbooks too?