In a moment of madness, I decided to help my dear daughter transition to dorm cooking by putting together a few recipes for her. I figured it would take a few days. As I worked on the list, I realized that, like all cooking, College Cooking consists of several interlocking parts--shopping, cooking, cleaning up. Each part has difficulties attached, for College Cooking, only more so: shopping is difficult, storage is difficult, and, oh yeah, no stove.
Then I decided that lots of students might be interested. So we decided to start a blog.
What I came up with, after several false starts, was this concept: rice cooker and microwave only; 20 ingredients, some condiments, 14 recipes. That way, the College Cook could shop once and eat for two weeks.
We created a coherent system, with all the interlocking parts. But a system like that isn't really best suited to the bit-by-bit format of the blog. It's more suited to a book.
Needless to say, something of the scope we developed doth not maketh a book. But I realized that neophyte cooks would be overwhelmed by a normal size cookbook. Then I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about how Amazon has made it easy for self-publishers to self-publish for Kindle.
Of course, I could not do this alone, and so enlisted my whole family, for help in writing, cooking, testing, editing, and so on. We learned many things. My style is too terse; Frugal Son has an aversion to commas, stuff like that. We learned that recipe-testing is hard. Things seldom come out quite the same way twice. We learned that authors of some rice cooker cookbooks must not test all the recipes, because some we tried did not come out. AT ALL.
I'm hoping that in the next few days our Tech Authority aka Frugal Son will be able to figure out how to set the whole thing up. Meanwhile, after a zillion proofreadings, I'm sure there are still mistakes.
Wish us luck.
From Shakespeare's Henry 5:
Still be kind
And eke out our performance with your mind.
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