the cook stack

Let me set the scene for you.

It’s a cold and dark winter night, a little drizzle outside. Your children are fast asleep, stuffies all around. You and your husband head downstairs to pour tiny glasses of wine and relax.

No, no, no. Not *that* kind of relaxing.

The kind where you sit six feet apart on the couch, him hustling on his laptop and you curled up with a cookbook and a brand new pack of Post-It flags.

Sound nice?

If so, you have found the right little place on the Internet. I am a cookbook lover and foodie. I finally, after all these years, put a little bookshelf in the corner of my open concept dining room and kitchen to display 37 books in my collection of nearly 200. It is much more convenient, and probably safer, than the unwieldy “cookstack” I previously kept on the kitchen counter.

To celebrate, I am embarking on what I call “A Completely Random Cooking Challenge”. In this challenge, I assigned each cookbook on my shelf a number from 1-37. I use a random number generator to spit out a number. I take the corresponding cookbook off the shelf, count the number of recipes in that book, and use the random number generator again to assign me a recipe to cook from the book.

The rules are:

1. I must stay as true to the recipe as possible.
2. I can skip the recipe entirely if I have cooked it before, if it has a hyper-seasonal ingredient (for example, wild ramps or a whole pumpkin), or prominently features an ingredient my family does not eat (for example, duck confit).
3. I can save the recipe for the weekend if it takes more than two consecutive hours of cooking time or has a hard-to-source ingredient (for instance, a six-hour oven braise that is finished with perilla oil).

Ready? Let’s go!

My first random number is 29! This belongs to What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking by Caroline Chambers. I am thrilled, because this cookbook is brand new to me, and whatever number I get next will be my very first recipe from the book. Let’s take a deep dive into the table of contents, which contains the full recipe list (woohoo, a big plus when cookbooks do this!) and geek out a bit before moving onto our recipe.

The book has 110 recipes, organized into time it takes to cook the recipe, starting with a “15-Ish Minutes” chapter and working up to more than an hour. There are also two extremely short chapters at the end of the book, with four recipes each, covering salads and desserts. I personally do not mind this organization – it reminds me of Milk Street Tuesday Nights. I like that each chapter has a diverse set of meals, although people wanting to cook specifically, say, chicken will have to do a little bit of recipe skimming. There are also a few silly nicknames for ingredients, although not as indecipherable as Molly Baz.

Here is a recipe breakdown by main ingredient, for every chapter but the last two short chapters, subject to my own counting errors:

• 20 white meat recipes (chicken, turkey)
• 27 red meat recipes (beef, pork)
• 19 seafood recipes (8 of which are salmon or shrimp)
• 36 vegetarian recipes

That’s quite a good chunk of vegetarian recipes, exciting for me, who is trying to eat a more plant-based diet! In the meal titles, I am also noticing a couple of vegetables that appear with high frequency. There are 4 recipe titles with the word “asparagus” in them and 5 with “cauliflower”.

I also observe there are a high proportion of Mexican- (11) and Asian-inspired (16) dishes.

Finally, and this is purely based on the recipe titles, I imagine many of this recipes can be made gluten- or lactose-free for my husband. There are not too many cheesy, pasta-type of dishes upon first glance at the table of contents. My children, on the other hand, might have a hard time with these recipes. I imagine I would have to deconstruct many of these plates into a kid’s dinner (think chicken with a little sauce and a raw vegetable on the side) for them.

Now it’s time to cook! What recipe will it be? After entering a range of 1 to 110 in my random number generator, I get 31, which corresponds to “Lemony Garlic Butter Shrimp Orzo”, a title that just sounds, frankly, classic and delicious. In short, this is a one-pot meal with orzo and marinated shrimp steaming together in a Dutch oven-type of vessel. Some green in the form of basil and peas are added at the very end, along with a good grating of Parmesan. There are few ingredients and few pieces of equipment. Love it.

This recipe will have to be a solo late night snack for me because the recipe contains 1) orzo and 2) Parmesan, which are decidedly not gluten- or lactose-free for my husband. The recipe also contains shrimp and peas, two things my children will reject (even the baby who eats anything including leaves, branches, and mulch, is a hard “no” to peas).

For these reasons, I opt to make a half recipe, which works out except for the shrimp. As I began adding shrimp to my pot, I feel the ratio of shrimp-to-pasta is too high, so I reserve about a quarter pound of shrimp to cook for my one shrimp-eating child tomorrow (she’ll eat anything pink). Otherwise, the recipe went very smoothly as written and took me about half an hour start-to-finish. I am always a little wary of cook times, but this one seemed accurate.

The verdict? Wonderful! In fact, it was one of the better things I have made recently. The one-pot meal was simple and elegant; it felt fresh, light, and classy. Such a shame I don’t see this becoming a family staple anytime soon. I’ll have to keep it my little late night secret. Shhh, don’t tell!