Decade-ance.

Ten years ago today, several years before this blog was conceived, I made a New Year's Resolution to  make one new recipe a week.  My daughter was eight years old then and my son was one. Motherhood took up so much of my time that I didn't have time for a hobby, but I really needed to be creative somehow.  I had always loved food and cooking, and my family had to eat anyway so this seemed like the obvious solution.

I noted down what each recipe was in a notebook, and asked my family to score them out of 5, though I always take the final decision on scoring my own food. A 5 is only deserved if a recipe has some kind of "Wow!" factor and you can't think of a way to improve it. As the weeks went by and I got more and more inspired, one new recipe wasn't enough. That first year, I made 114. Sometimes they were full-on and complex but sometimes only a dip, a sauce or a cocktail. Here's the first page:

I tried to write legibly, though neat handwriting isn't something I'm gifted with, maybe that's why typing was one of the few things I got an A for at school. Since then, more than 50 pages of the notebook have been filled.  Some years have been more full on than others, life events sometimes got  in the way, but I never stopped wanting to try new recipes.  And I never did it because I felt I had to.

This year I've made 72. To date, the grand total stands at 1040. Dividing by ten years and fifty-two weeks per year, that makes it exactly two a week over the ten years! Since 2014 the total for each year has been less than 100, partly due to the car crash and single parenthood, but I'm not stopping.

The percentage of five out of five recipes has varied quite a lot.  The first five-scorer, and the only one in the first year was lamb karahi. In 2009 there were 25 five-scorers out of a total of 126 recipes that year. By 2011 there were 52 five-scorers out of 141. In 2013 I started doing meat-free Monday and made 25 new meat-free main courses;  that year there were 61 five-scorers out of 120. My personal top five have been lobster soup (a labour of love and took forever but was so worth it), red Thai prawn curry using a friend's homemade curry paste made with her own home grown chillies, pink champagne cupcakes - of which a second batch was made for another friend's wedding, sticky Vietnamese pork meatballs with rice noodles and pickled vegetables, and iced berry and eggnog trifle cake. It was so difficult to choose though, my choices would probably be different tomorrow.

There have been triumphs, disasters and injuries that have scarred me for life along the way (I don't store baking trays on top of the fridge freezer anymore!) but it has been and continues to be a way of life rather than the hobby it was originally intended to be.  It will be interesting to see what the next ten years will bring.

Thank you for your support readers, and Happy New Year.

Caroline.