Tuesday, July 5, 2011

The Dish a Day Challenge

Real quick background on myself and the reason why this exists at all.  I'm a 23 year old recent college graduate with a degree in aerospace engineering, I'm a nerd and I love to cook.  Those three things pretty much define me.  Unfortunately, I have recently run into a snag with my cooking.  Namely I've gotten into a rut and fallen victim to a repetitive streak.  There are a few dishes that I consistently fall back on and I have given myself no reason to branch out and try new flavors, techniques or ideas.  In trying to come up with new ideas and things to try I realized that I just need to make myself do it, and put something in place to drive me to actually follow through, and maybe make it a bit more entertaining for myself in the mean time.  Thus was born my Dish a Day challenge.

The idea is very simple, I must make or eat a new and unrepeated dish every day for a year.  This means one new dish, breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert or even a snack (as long as it actually requires preparation not just throwing a bag of popcorn into the microwave... even I'm not that lame).  I'm allowed to eat out, so long as I order something new, and I'm allowed to eat something someone else has ordered, again as long as its new.  Finally, new versions of dishes also count so long as they are actually different.  For example, if I make a spaghetti with a stove-top spaghetti sauce, that is pretty different from pasta with a baked sauce, or a cream sauce.  Spaghetti with stove-top sauce is pretty much the same thing as ziti with a stove-top sauce so that wouldn't count.  Obviously what constitutes "actually different" is going to change based on how lazy I am on a given day, but I figure setting some ground rules is at least a good idea.

I'll be trying to put up my new dish every day, but I travel a lot and it won't always be possible to update every day.  I'll try to give you all a heads up when I'm out of town and will be unable to post, but no promises.

Finally, I hope that this is fairly entertaining for you all.  I'm not an incredible chef\cook, nor am I a phenomenal writer, but I get by.  I'm doing this mostly for myself, but I wouldn't put it online, and wouldn't do a blog if I wasn't going to at least try and keep things interesting.  With that, here goes nothing.

No comments:

Post a Comment