the cook stack

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to my old-school cooking blog! No AI, no social media, just a place for a suburban stay-at-home-mom to have a creative outlet to help me battle the very-real, post-weaning depression I have been experiencing these past few weeks.

I do love to cook and bake. In fact, I am obsessed. I lie in bed at night thinking of what to cook and bake the next day. It has been, perhaps, less of an obsession and more of a problem lately. I underwent a little retail therapy on cookbooks over the last year, and I am completely out of storage space in my house and have dozens of cookbooks that I have never cooked a single recipe from. So, in an effort to cook through more of them, I am embarking on what I call “A Completely Random Cooking Challenge”. I have selected the cookbooks I am most interested in and “vibing with” right now and placed them on this bookshelf in the corner of my dining room. The rest are precariously stacked in my closet and under my bed.

I assigned each cookbook a number from 1-38, in order from top left to bottom right. I listed all of the recipes in each cookbook in Microsoft Word documents. Then, I used Google’s random number generator to spit out a number from 1 to 38, checked how many recipes were in the corresponding cookbook, and used the random number generator again to assign me a recipe from the list to cook. Here is my first batch of 10 random recipes, which I will attempt to cook next week, after a grocery store run.

Random number 1	Book	Random number 2	Recipe
21	Big Vegan Flavor	87	Buttermilk Fried “Chicken” with Cornbread and Dilly Slaw
17	Yassou	43	Bean Soup
20	Milk Street Tuesday Nights	140	Fish Tacos with Lime-Pickled Jalapeños
24	Tahini Baby	22	Dukkah Toast
34	Sweet Enough	4	Caramelized Maple Tart
12	Make It Japanese	9	Potato Salad
14	East	24	Rutabaga Laksa
18	What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking	49	Sausage and Pepper Frittata
10	Amrikan	50	Makhana Mac and Cheese
22	Start Here	46	Tofu and Bok Choy with Ginger Garlic Scallion Sauce

My first impressions is that this will be an, erm, healthy few days? To be honest, I would not have selected any of these recipes to cook or bake without the random number generator. These are not my favorite ingredients. I have had the following *gulp* cooking failures in just the past six months with:

• An unappealing fried tofu sandwich
• An gulag-style bean soup
• An inedible maple custard that never set

So, let’s call this a redemption tour. Buckle up, everyone!

Here’s the meal plan, with random, new-to-me recipes highlighted. I am grocery shopping on a Friday, so I have planned for my family accordingly. I can cook something more complex for dinner and do a little meal prep on Sundays because my husband, and often brother-in-law, can help watch the kids. On Tuesdays, my in-laws come for a few hours, and I usually undertake a marathon meal prep and cooking session during that time. All other weeknights, and Saturdays, need to be fast and easy meals, or something I can make ahead and reheat at dinnertime. I do usually cook after my kids are all tucked into bed, to make myself some interesting lunch for the next day or bake a treat.

Day	Adult dinner	Kid dinner	Other meal prep and/or baking
Friday	Rigatoni with red pepper sauce Sausage and Pepper Frittata	Rigatoni with butter	Potato Salad Dukkah Toast
Saturday	Fish Tacos with Lime-Pickled Jalapeños	Build your own taco (family style)
Sunday	Buttermilk Fried “Chicken” with Cornbread and Dilly Slaw	Chicken nuggets	Tofu and Bok Choy with Ginger Garlic Scallion Sauce
Monday	Rutabaga Laksa	Penne with butter
Tuesday	Bean Soup Sourdough	Sourdough sandwiches	Makhana Mac and Cheese Caramelized Maple Tart
Wednesday	Leftovers	Leftovers
Thursday	Leftovers/TBD	Leftovers/TBD

Clearly, I have stacked my cooking work in the first half of the week when motivation is highest and produce is freshest. This also gives me some wiggle room if I get behind schedule.

Let’s see how this experiment goes.

Ready

Get Set

Go!