So what's this cook-through thing anyway?

What's a cook-through?

A cook-through blog is a project in which some brave cook attempts to cook every recipe in a particular cookbook, posting thoughts on (and usually pictures of) each one as they go. They don't generally go in order, although smart bloggers don't leave all the recipes they suspect they won't like until the end of their projects. There is a meta-blog linking all the cook-throughs that I know of here.
I will link to my favorite cook-throughs in the sidebar. Check them out!

Why this cookbook?

I keep kosher. I don't really use any kosher cookbooks; my go-to sources for recipes are the Gourmet Cookbook, epicurious, the New York Times' food section, and most especially the oeuvre of Mark Bittman, whose How to Cook Everything is an excellent cookbook to get anyone who's about to start cooking for themselves. That said, much as I love HTCE, or Bittman's The Best Recipes in the World, I don't see a way of making kosher Shrimp on Lemongrass Skewers. Kosher cookbooks sidestep this problem, but they fall into two broad categories: books that are lame and/or super-traditional in a way that will clog my arteries without broadening my horizons, and books that explore the traditional Jewish cuisine of a particular region, such as Aleppo, Syria, which I'm sure are fabulous but lean towards the peel-every-chickpea-before-making-this-pilaf school of cooking. I'm not interested in the former, and not dedicated enough to attempt the latter.
This leaves vegetarian cookbooks. While N and I are not vegetarians, I do eat a quasi-vegetarian diet, because that's what I like. I generally only cook meat for Shabbos, and cook mostly vegan during the week, because while I like meat and wouldn't want to give it up entirely, I'm very happy on a diet made largely of vegetables, fruit, beans, chocolate, whole grains, and breakfast cereal with milk. Many vegetarian cookbooks are big on butter, cheese, and lots of white starches like pastas, which I worry would make us inflate if we ate that way regularly. How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which was my first thought of a candidate, is a doorstop of a cookbook that would take me at least five years to cook through, with tons of recipes I'm sure I'd love, plus many that I'd never really normally make, like buttery baked goods (95% of my baking is for Shabbos, when we always have meat meals.) So I needed to find an accessible cookbook that used the sorts of ingredients I like. I took several out from the library to live with them for a bit, and settled on Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian (WV, in the future). I do think the title is a bit of a misnomer - it's more like 'Three Hundred or So Indian Recipes Plus Another Four Hundred (Give Or Take) Recipes from My Friends of Various Ethnicities and From Places I've Vacationed,' but that's a bit less snappy. I do find some of the focuses interesting (lots of food from the Indian diaspora of Trinidad, for example), and some of the omissions puzzling (why no food from the Indian diasporas of Fiji, Uganda, South Africa, etc.? Why almost nothing from Southeast Asia except Indonesia, when Thai food is so awesome?), but overall, I look forward to exploring the world with Madhur.

So How Long Will This Take, Anyway?

WV is subtitled, "More Than 650 Meatless Recipes From Around the Globe," but I count 712 recipes. If I can cook an average of four new WV recipes a week, that's a bit under three and a half years. I hope to get through it faster, but I'm aiming for four to start with.

A Few Ground Rules:

1. I will try to cook every recipe in World Vegetarian. (Note the 'try' in the previous sentence. Some things may be impossible to get kosher. More on that later.)
2. I will try to be as faithful to the recipes as possible. I will not modify things except as outlined below.
3. I will try to be fair to foods with ingredients that I personally dislike, but that seem like they'd be unobjectionable to someone who didn't share my tastes.

I reserve the right to:

1. Halve or double recipes as necessary - we are only two people over here, and some recipes are made to serve many. Also, we both hate tomatoes, so I can't see us wanting to eat vast quantities of, say, Sliced Tomatoes in a Tomato Sauce. On the other hand, sometimes we have company and might want more of a particular dish.
2. Never garnish with cilantro - I don't like cilantro. I avoid it when possible, especially the raw stuff (cooking it mellows it a bit.) If cilantro is a major part of a recipe, I will include it as called for, but if it's just a tablespoon or so of garnish, I will replace it with parsley. In the rest of my cooking life, I replace all cilantro with parsley, which works well for me.
3. Not precisely measure every single ingredient. I measure olive oil by seconds of pouring (one second = ~1 tablespoon), eyeball my chopped garlic, etc.
4. Reduce the salt in recipes - I've found in cooking a few trial recipes that Madhur sometimes likes her food much saltier than N or I do.
5. Take something off the heat if I think it's burning, even if the recipe says to give it more time, or cook it at a lower temperature if that seems necessary.
6. Keep it kosher - There are ingredients for which I have not yet found kosher sources. I will do my best, but as far as I know, there ain't no kosher cellophane noodles out there, at least in the USA. Ditto for fermented black beans, and several other ingredients. I will keep a wish list in the sidebar, and if you find something on it, please do let me know. But if I'm getting to the end of my project and haven't found cellophane noodles yet, I will have to make those recipes with the best substitute I can get. Or I might just have to ferment my own black beans. We'll see how crazy I get.
7. Only make things once, even if I screw the recipe up. Into every cook's life, a few screwups must fall, and so to in every cookthrough.

Who are you, anyway?
Gila S.: Age 28 as of this writing. Master's degree in Public Health from Columbia (Environmental Health Sciences, Molecular Epidemiology track), but sadly unemployed. I like eating, so I'm willing to spend time and effort cooking. Married to the wonderful N, and living in northern Manhattan, far away from fancy specialty stores, Chinatown, and Little India, whence ingredients like chana dal and Chinese chives might be procured.