From Page to Plate

Setting up a new blog may be a very bad idea. I started blogging in October when I began 'the Jamie project': cooking my way through Cook with Jamie, the latest book from the Naked Chef. I had no idea where this ill-conceived plan might lead (and I haven't finished yet...) but I find myself itching to try out my teetering towers of other cookbooks and, inexplicably, to blog about them. For a long time, I nurtured an unjustified suspicion of bloggers as self-obsessed performers, seeking a platform from which to display themselves to the world; as watered down versions of the people who queue up to try to get onto Big Brother or to warble tunelessly in order to make it onto television for the X factor. When my friend began blogging, I was initially shocked and then addicted, tuning into her literary wisdom on a daily basis; I was reassured that she wasn't using the blog as a public diary, and even more relieved that she wasn't using it to analyse her friends. Eventually, when I felt drawn to cook through Jamie's new book (and blog it), I was slightly ashamed of myself and unwilling to tell people I know. I still don't tell people, but my mother appears to make up for my reticence. Anyway, my hang-ups aside, I have got used to blogging and I don't feel ready, quite, to give it up.

I will continue to cook through Jamie's book on my original blog. Here, though, a new project begins, this one much less disciplined than the last. The clue lies in its title (Simon's idea, not mine) and in my self-confessed cookery book addiction. 'From page to plate' will review and test recipes from my extensive range of cookery books, both new acquisitions and old friends and the books I've bought and shamefully failed to cook from (there are very few of those, but there are some). I'm no professional and I'm not even the kind of blogger who makes recipes up; I am mainly book-bound, both in cooking and in life more generally. I may not restrict myself to food-related subjects; I read as much as, more than, I cook and whilst my work involves reading the most obscure of French novels, outside it I read almost everything. Anyone who knows me will probably realize that I have contrived to invent myself a project that will justify future expenditure on yet more (cook)books; my excuse is simply that it makes me happy. I would much rather live in a space threatened by tumbling piles of well-thumbed books than somewhere where books represented clutter to be kept out of sight.

Here, then, my new blog begins. The original will continue, until I've finished Cook with Jamie (somehow I can't yet begin to imagine how that will feel), but this blog will live alongside it for the nights (that will become increasingly numerous as I edge towards the end of my Jamie project) that I simply can't manage to cook from the remaining recipes in the book and need something new. I will probably keep this blog pretty quiet too, particularly at work, because you never know when you will feel the need to vent spleen about a colleague and I wouldn't want to feel unnecessarily censored or constrained. I don't want to turn my blog into a grumblefest, though - to me, reading and eating are equally vital (although I read more greedily than I eat, mostly) and I am very happy to indulge myself in both - and to write about them afterwards. Therein lie the main aims for this blog: to read, to trial, to review, and to create. Oh, and to buy more books, obviously.