Right back in the beginning, when this blog started out, I knew that I would have to stretch myself.
It’s easy, so very easy, to just stick to cooking what I normally cook when what I wanted was to see if I could do something different most days of the week. I thought that taking pictures and telling you all what I was doing, would make me too embarrassed to repeat myself. I have lots of cookery books so there had to be thousands of recipes close at hand… just waiting to be chosen.
I needed to work out how I picked the recipes I was going to make. The difficulty was that I might just go along with whatever I fancied, when what I needed to do was to cook things completely randomly.
Could I be trusted to pick randomly? Probably not. I’d probably choose what I quite liked the look of and reject the tricky or the not immediately likeable recipes.
And then I came up with Cookery Lotto. I had lots of cookery books and I have lots of friends. Put the two together I thought……
The basic idea was that one of them chose a random number and, in a very scientific fashion, a cookery book was chosen.
The technical explanation of this method? I counted along the bookshelves until I got to the number that was chosen.
Then… and this was the cunning bit… I told them how many pages there were in the book and someone else picked a page number!
I had nothing to do other than cook what they came up with.
On the first go, Looby picked “The Prawn Cocktail Years” and Els picked page number 49… and the result was Creamed Spinach. A resounding success in my eyes, but there again, I do so love spinach.
The poor Bear isn’t such a fan but as I am training him to be truly omnivorous then he does what he is told and he eats what he is given. He sort of liked it.
He’s really hoping that this time he gets something he would really want to eat.
So… Cookery Lotto, Part Two!
New rules though….. what we do this time is that everyone who wants to join in just picks a number… then one day later I see how many answers there are and divide the sum of the numbers by the amount of people picking them… that gives answer number one, which is, the cookery book we are working from.
Once we know that, we will know how many pages are in the book and we do the same thing for the recipe.
I have just gone and counted along the bookshelves…in this apartment there are 156 books close to hand. That should give us something to go at.
They range from cookery books bought in Bangalore for a few rupees to books bought in specialist book stores costing over £50. There are thick books, thin books, old books and new books… There’s books on there that I adore and there are, I have to say, books I have never ever cooked from.
So…. the game is on.
Pick a number from 1 to 156. It’s not too much to ask is it? Just pick a number and tell me what it is….