the year ahead in cooking

paul and i live in cambridge, massachusetts in a garden-level cave cabin near harvard square; i dream about flying and he dreams about giant trout. heather and jack live in missoula, montana in an apartment i am nostalgic about: its balcony under the great pine tree, the kitties skidding around on the pine floor inside. despite the distance, we will continue to cook together. this is our resolution for 2010.

so every month in the year ahead, heather and i, with a little help from our fellows and our friends, will cook a meal which we will share here, in a map made of words and pictures. each month will have a theme, a set of limitations bound seasonally as well as intentionally. each month must also challenge us to cook something new, to go beyond what we have cooked before, to transform what we know. we will also each have the help of the flavor bible by karen page and andrew dornenburg, a cookbook which has no recipes, but is more like a rhyming dictionary for flavor. what is genius without resource?

in the first month, we will make soup and bread. but enough prose. let me hibernate the rest of this december and wake in a new decade.