I think most recipes in my Silver Palete cookbooks are easy, very simple.
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ANDREA NGYUEN MONTH (assuming it covers all her books?)
NIGELLISIMA
VIANA LA PLACE
MAANGCHI
I dont understand how this is going to work. When we started out it was going to be 3 books, no categories. Now we have categorization and voting. All the books that I would vote for are placed in the crossover category. do we have a vote in each category? And are we voting for 2 books or 3. There are only a few books that have received more than a couple of nominations, Why cant we just select the two or three most nominated books?
I agree that Silver Palate is mainly simple and id imagine Nigelissima is too - most books will have some recipes for special occasions but these are mass market books . Please people if you thing a book you nominated or know well is in the wrong category I guess now is the time to speak up. But it really depends on how voting will work and that is not clear.
ps I am personally totally comfortable with the nomination and decision process previously announced for this quarter here Summer 2024 Cookbook of the Month nominations - Jul, Aug, Sept. Why not try it again for another quarter without voting separate from nomination and see how it goes?
Categorizations are artificial — I only did a straw man to help people think about the books in the ways we have have discussed.
That is, is there something easy enough for people who can only participate in an everyday way, and is there something to keep people who are interested in project-y books.
Voting has never been optional — it’s the way COTM has always worked.
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At the risk of being a stuck record, I don’t think we need more than 2 books.
We also don’t need a vote by category.
If the top 2 books are from the crossover category, they work for all.
If both the top books are from either of the project group or the everyday group, we can pick the 2nd book to be the one with the most votes from the crossover or other, however it fell out.
For eg:, if the vote falls out as:
Easy 1
Easy 2
Project 1
Project 2
The selection for next quarter can be:
Easy 1
Project 1
Which keeps both groups of folks who want to join in engaged.
If instead the voting was:
Crossover 1
Crossover 2
Project 1
Easy 1
Then the selection for next quarter can be:
Crossover 1
Crossover 2
Because both sets of folks are already covered by the top 2 books — we don’t need a separate “easy” or “project” in the mix, they are already included in crossover
It’s a Venn diagram with significant overlaps, not isolated buckets.
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I’m going to throw out a suggestion for future consideration. Instead of easy, project, crossover, maybe divide the world into Europe (& Eastern Europe) and Western Hemisphere in a category and Asia and Africa and maybe the Middle East in another category. There seems to be a lot of interest in various Asian cuisines but would you want to have 2 or 3 of them at the same time regardless of their ease or difficulty?
Thinking more about concerns regarding how this will work, categories, so on:
Nominations seem to have naturally fallen out with both ends of the interest spectrum incorporated – mostly “crossovers,” with multiple books under each.
So even a simple vote among the top noms will provide 2 sets of options that should work for pretty much everyone.
And because almost every nom has multiple books+blogs under it, we’ll have a lot more than 2 or 3 books to work from for the quarter.
Which is easier than anticipated, and I hope bodes well for participation 
7 noms – Pati Jinich (3 books + website)
6 – Andrea Nguyen (7 books + website)
4 – Viana LaPlace (9 books)
4 – Maangchi (3 books + website)
4 – Dishoom (1 book)
Voting (hopefully correctly) for ANDREA NGUYEN. I have already bookmarked several recipes in Ever-Green that I want to make.
Nominations are CLOSED. It’s going to take me a bit to suss out how the voting is going to work, so be patient. I do hope to have the voting thread up today.
My understanding of how the polls work is that you can only choose one selection in a poll. So if we are selecting more than one book, there must be more than one poll. That means breaking the books up into categories to put them in one of the polls. OR… I could put all of the top nominees into more than one poll (each poll would have the exact same list of books) and do something like ranked choice voting where in the first poll, people select their first choice, and in the second poll, their second choice, etc. And then assign points for being chosen in the first choice poll, fewer points for the second choice poll.
If you see another way of doing this, please explain.
I’ll DM you
OK, folks, the voting thread is here:
I welcome feedback on this method, but I won’t be making any further changes for this quarter.
Also, this is the last quarter that I will be coordinating COTM. Please, if you have an interest in the survival of COTM, consider volunteering to coordinate for future quarters.
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@MelMM a huge thank you for all that you have done coordinating COTM!! A giant, almost thankless labor of love for sure.
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Second that!
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ditto, a major, major contribution and labor of love!
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How is everyone feeling about how things have gone this quarter, with 3 different books over 3 months? Is there interest in continuing COTM? Is anyone interested in stepping in as coordinator, or as part of a team of coordinators? I believe Mel decided to step back (sorry if I am mistaken on this).
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Mel has been missed for all her contributions, beyond her stewardship of COTM. I hope she will be back. And thank you to @CaitlinM for all her continuing efforts.
I propose that we continue with what we set up last quarter as multiple books, so as not to create too much change while there seem to be organizing changes afoot.
I would be glad to coordinate this time around.
Looks like we’ll be on a week’s delay given where we re on the calendar, but that’s not the end of the world.
If anyone else is interested in stepping up to organizing in the future, please DM @LulusMom1 and me and we can get a group going if we still want to keep COTM alive.
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Please join us to nominate books for next quarter:
