It’s high time to nominate titles for our March Cookbook of the Month. What books inspire you as we inch our way into spring?
In order to nominate, please put the name of the book in ALL CAPS in the comments below. Only titles in all caps will be counted as nominations. (If you’re discussing a book, but not nominating, please use regular capitalization for clarity.) You many nominate as many books as you wish. Please nominate with the intention of joining us in cooking from the book and reporting on the dishes you make, should your nominee be selected.
Nominations will end MONDAY, JANUARY 19 at 11 PM GMT/7 PM EDT/4 PM PDT.
Visit the COTM archive for a list of our past selections. And there is still plenty of time to keep cooking from our February book, Ethiopia.
Lots of unexpected stuff happened to me in this month, and I’ve only very recently started cooking from my favorite, which was Ethiopia, and I haven’t managed to post yet. So, I don’t want to nominate until I see a better month ahead for my family in March.
When will nominations close? Do you mean Monday, February 19?
I’m going to be out of town for at least 10 days in March. But I will need to cook the rest of the time, and I will have a kitchen on my trip, so may even cook there, but I’ll need to keep it simple.
I gotta nominate one of last month’s finalists: MICHAEL SOLOMONOV MONTH (Zahav/Israeli Soul). The wealth of salads in these books would make great great road food/packed lunches for me durning my trip.
After I gave up on the Diana Henry book, I decided for the fun of it to do some cooking from my Isa Chandra Moskowitz books. Books I have had for years and hadn’t cooked from most of them at all. So I did a little multi-book COTM and cooked at least one recipe from each book, and I was impressed with the quality of the recipe writing and solid results for pretty easy recipes (some books easier than others). So I’d like to nominate an ISA CHANDRA MOSKOWITZ MONTH. She has too many books to do them all. If we eliminate the baking and brunch books, that would get it down to seven. Maybe doable? I would also be agreeable to limiting it further. Maybe to Veganomicon and Isa Does It, the former being a classic and the later an easier book.
That is the one I had actually cooked from before starting my personal COTM last month. Tonight I’m making an asparagus and white bean soup from I Can Cook Vegan.
I’m another one who will be away for a chunk of March (as I am now) and am not nominating. Maybe there aren’t enough of us right now who can put in the time.
Even though I’ll be away for almost 1/3 of the month, if it’s the right book, I can still make quite a few recipes. I’m going to have to eat even while I’m traveling, and restaurants can be difficult/stressful for me, so I have no intention of eating out the whole time.
Yes, but 2 people voted for Ethiopia last month (not including me – I did not vote because I couldn’t commit) and 2 of us have cooked from it, so what should we consider a bar for engagement?
Otherwise we can just start “Cooking From” threads for books with not much broad interest, and people can add to them as and when. The idea of COTM used to be cook together, which seems to have faded in interest for non-mainstream books.
Three have cooked from it, I believe. But yes, engagement is low so far. Honestly, this has been troubling me for a while. I’ve been pretty frustrated with the books that have been getting selected. My desire to cook from yet another Melissa Clark or Diana Henry book is low. I don’t get much from those books and the food is generally no better, and often worse, than what I would make on my own. But that is the sort of book that gets the votes and the engagement on the thread.
I’ve been trying to think of a solution where those who want/need more of the get-dinner-on-the-table type books get what they need, and those of us who want something more adventurous get enough to stay engaged. Here is my best idea so far: We move away from the monthly COTM to a quarterly selection. This was mentioned when we came over here after CH shut down, and I didn’t like the idea then, because heaven forbid we get stuck with a lame book for a full quarter. So what I would propose is that we choose books on a quarterly basis, but choose three (unrelated!) books. So we would still have 12 books/year, but we would have more than one happening at once, and we would have a longer period of time to cook from them. This would also solve another problem, which is that there have been only two of us doing the coordinating for the past two years, and it’s kind of a lot. Reducing the frequency of the nomination process would help ease the burden for me and @CaitlinM. We could do a single nomination process, and possibly not vote at all and just take the top 3 nominees, or we do ranked-choice voting.
Another thing this would solve is the issue of people who are going away for one week out of a month feeling like they shouldn’t nominate or vote.
I had proposed going quarterly like the other cook-along threads when we moved COTM over here, so I’m still good with that.
There used to be more people who considered COTM a fun project or way to expand their cooking repertoire; I think we are currently in a phase of easier-is-better for the most part — or perhaps not “easier” but things that are more mainstream and simpler to slot into menus.
In terms of how many books, trying to nominate and select 3 feels like a lot — though I understand the desire to have 12 per year.
I do think adding “Cooking From” threads provides a different way to approach cooking “together” from books that don’t elicit broad appeal. There will be other people who will end up cooking from a book, sometimes because they see someone else cooking from them, other times because they had never encountered the book before someone posted something appealing, and so on. I remember they were sometimes precursors to COTM, especially when a book was too new to nominate, or didn’t have much group appeal yet.
(I’d be glad to help coordinate going forward; the past year was a collection of anomalies where it just wasn’t possible, but hopefully that’s over and done with.)
One thing I really, really want to avoid is being stuck with one bad book for three months. I couldn’t even make it through a month of that last Diana Henry book. And when we did Thomas Keller month, I couldn’t even find anything I wanted to make. It’s just inevitable that there will sometimes be a book that is a complete non-starter for someone, and they shouldn’t have to wait three months for something (maybe) better to come along. On the other hand, I don’t want to become like the Food52 or EYB cookbook groups, where there are so many books happening at once that there is no focus at all.
I don’t think selecting three will be any harder than selecting one. We currently usually put up three for the vote anyway, so we could just take the ones with the most nominations and only vote if we need a tiebreaker.
