I’m siting in my car and I’m inspired to talk about daydreams.
If I could be paid to daydream - what a lovely and lucrative career. I know, you’re thinking, “Yeah, it would be great to sit around and do nothing all day - nice job.” But I’m talking about real creative work here, something of value that I think I can offer.
I’ve had a lot of dreams over the years. Many are profitable in and of themselves, if only there was someone with the time and determination to see them through to the end. One of my favorites is the one about the cookbook.
It seems to me that cookbooks are often simply either collections of recipes or instructions how to perform generic cooking tasks, like “cook a chicken” or “bake a cake”. There aren’t any great meal planning guides, and even those assume you keep ingredients (saffron??) around the house that you wouldn’t ever think to buy without planning for that meal in advance.
What I would like to see in a cookbook is one that helps you plan out a shopping list that changes very infrequently, perhaps only when you specifically plan ahead for a special event. It might also help plan a “starter” shopping list for the things that you might use rarely, but would need often enough to want to avoid a special trip, like certain spices.
The recipes in the book would not be geared simply to what you have on hand, but coordinate with what you should have based on the shopping list it helps you generate. The ideas in the book should let you mix and match ingredients to get wildly different dishes from the same base set of ingredients, plus a dash or two from items on the starter list.
The book would help you determine what dishes you liked best, what to keep on your list and what to take off based on what recipes you enjoyed. It would keep in mind that if you’re budgeting your money on groceries, you’re possibly also budgeting your time, and should let you filter out meals with long cook times when your time is in short supply. It shouldn’t skimp on flavor, and it should try to offer healthy choices.
Our best cookbooks at home usually focus on just one thing. Either they pick “10-minute meals” or they pick “budget dinners” or they pick “fat-free foods”. Many try to hit all three, but always neglect the effort it takes to gather the raw materials in advance. I think this is a key component; more important than what “famous” Food Network host has her photo on the cover.
If I had the skill of a chef, I might have attempted this long ago. I enjoy the experimentation of cooking (available to me less now that the kids are so finnicky), but not so much to waste the experimentation time that this book would require. Of course, if it was my job to think creatively all day, then I would have much more time to experiment with such things.
That said, if someone else published a book like this, I would be very interested in checking it out.
What’s funny about this post is that I had originally intended to describe a completely different daydream idea. Maybe I’ll share that one some other time.
