2006 in Review

A Food Year was a challenge I set for myself to eat a different dinner every day of 2006. Although it probably looks like a panned out version of some sort of drunken new year’s eve dare now, it was actually an ambitious effort to write a cookbook that ended up developing into the website that you see here. An actual book never made it into existence, but would likely be a cleaned and buffed up version more or less of what you see in the 2006 archives with better pictures, less spelling mistakes, recipes that can actually be followed with positive results and so on.

Over the year I overcame a few aversions; the taste of cilantro, the seemingly impossible task of making any recipe coined east of Ukraine… ate some atrociously bad dinners; such as a few aforementioned Asian recipes and anything involving tofu… made friends with many new-to-me flavor combinations, and, in general, learned a fair amount about food and cooking - which was kind of the point. I had a few mishaps (an exploding casserole dish comes to mind) and learned a few tricks. For example, flambé is neat.

It was tough at times. There were some days where I made several dinners in one night to replace missed days due to circumstances out of my control or general laziness. By the end of the project, I was eating in restaurants half the time because I’d burned out, I’d run out of ideas for what to buy, what to make. To make matters worse, I moved to Montreal with nothing but a few pieces of luggage and had to do without a functional kitchen. But I survived, I did it, and when it was over, when I had my pick of any dinner I desired, after everyone kept asking me, “What’s the first thing you’re going to eat when you’re done?” I failed to repeat myself for yet another week.

There were 692 recipes uploaded to this site over the 365 period, which doesn’t include every time I ate at a restaurant or at someone else’s home. You can view them all here as one ridiculously long list or here as a pictorial calendar overview, which is probably preferable.