I just felt like doing one more week with the book.
There’s actually a lot of recipes in the book that interest me. Some stop me cold because there’s an ingredient that you actually have to have that I’d have to special order. Achiote paste, for example: I actually have achiote seeds, but not paste. It’s not that hard to get, but you hit a limit (or at least I do) if you’re trying to keep some of the key ingredients of 3-4 specialized cuisines in your pantry. Or like last week, the sourcing of the main protein or some key produce in some recipes would be kind of a headache.
It’s oddly weak in some places. The salads, for example, are mostly very centered on meat or seafood and not all that interesting to me. On the other hand, the soups are great-looking, and I was almost tempted to make one of those. But what I’m going with is a very simple dish of mussels with chipotle and orange. I don’t know if Miller was the chef who popularized this combination in the first place, but you can find it on the menu at a lot of halfway decent Mexican/Southwestern restaurants all across the country. (Which is something that has changed in the course of my life: when I first came to college in the East in the 1980s, coming across a decent restaurant serving anything like Mexican, Tex-Mex, or Southwestern food was unusual outside of New York City or Washington DC.)
Anyway, you can likely bet on the book surviving. I still doubt I’ll use it very often but there’s at least 5-8 recipes in it that I have some desire to make and a few that are in that sweet spot of “I will remember how to do this” and “but I’ll need the book as a reference”. Still, you never know, maybe the mussels will be terrible and it’ll be the book’s fault and I will be struck with mercurial displeasure. Check in later to find out!
THE RULES FOR COOKBOOK SURVIVOR
There are no rules. I’ll substitute ingredients if I want or if I have to, I’ll pick recipes capriciously, I’ll keep a book in contention for weeks or toss it after a single week. Authors are free to write me and tell me I’m incompetent or a jerk.
Also HERE’s THE DEAL: You get Cookbook Survivor in TWO INSTALLMENTS. One on Saturday morning telling you what I’m gonna do, and one on Saturday evening telling you how it went.