2010: The Year Of...

...cheap cookbooks! that's right. see that collection of 9 cookbooks there? they cost me a total of $51. i scored them all from the bargain table at border's over the years (except for the charlie palmer book there in the middle, which i got free by winning it from another food blogger). and most of them have lots of full-color photos to accompany the recipes, which i appreciate. the problem is, as incredible as the bargain seems, i've actually suffered a loss of $51 at this point because i have yet to use these books even once! ((okay, i did make one recipe out of the charlie palmer book. i--and quite a few others--was asked to Guest Blog on the blog from which i won the book because the blogger was going through a bad spell and needed some posts to fill in. i used one of the charlie palmer recipes and wrote it up a la caridgan & co. and submitted it, but it never got published. she wound up receiving more guest submissions than she needed, which is a good thing. i'm not sure the real food blogosphere is ready for my characters' shenanigans.)) so, i've decided to dedicate 2010 to turning those books into the bargains that they were destined to be, rather than the financial setbacks they now represent. of course, the books will have to come through with good recipes; if not, they will never be a bargain. i'm going to do my part, though. not that any of you who might be reading this care--i know you don't come here for the cooking, and certainly not for the recipes since i don't provide them (ostensibly for copyright reasons but, more truthfully, because it's a pain in the ass to type them up). my hope is that the blog will keep me motivated to use the cookbooks. more than it did this year with The New Best Recipe experiment, that is :)