Different Dinner Project (2006)

A Food Year originated and evolved from a project in 2006 where I set out to blog about my experience preparing a different dinner every day for a year. To my knowledge there is only one other person that has undertaken this task and, unfortunately, his blog is no longer in service. Therefore, I am now the reigning campaign of bloggers who have eaten a different dinner every day for a year. Unfortunately this title comes with no perks whatsoever.

A year of doing anything is not an easy task. Many people struggle with a new year’s resolution to floss daily, let alone create several dishes unique to their predacessors every night and still find the time to update a website about it. It is extremely difficult, yet I still wholly recommend undertaking this endeavor for the following reasons:

You will overcome food aversions and discover new favorites.
If you are serious about this goal, there will come a time when you need to seek out unfamiliar ingredients to face the task of preparing something original. Sometimes this means tackling your nemesis head on, which can make a week-long battle to find an appropriate place on a plate. Other times this means buying a new cookbook to figure out just what you can do with a durian fruit. Regardless, if your rules are strigent enough, you’re only going to get so far with a half filled pantry and your usual fare of produce. 5 years later, there are still new ingredients that I’m discovering, and that’s a wonderful experience.

You will learn new things.
You can’t tackle this project head on without learning new cooking techniques and finding new food sources and ingredients. Beyond that though you can learn something about yourself and what you’re capable of. Plus, you’ll finish with a unique accomplishment under your belt when you’re chalking up your life experiences.

You will save money.
One of the most often asked questions when I was doing this project was how I was coping with my soaring grocery bill. Well, the opposite is true. Preparing food in your own home is often the most cost effective way of getting dinner on the table. For almost the entire duration of the project, I did not exceed $200 for my monthly food bill. This was to feed two people in an isolated oil town in Northern Alberta with nowhere to shop but chain supermarkets, no less!

There were 692 recipes uploaded to this site over the 365 day period, which doesn’t include every time I ate at a restaurant or at someone else’s home. The best way to browse the 2006 content is through the pictoral calendar, which you can find here.

Since the original focus of this website was a fixed term project and I had not anticipated its continuation, there has been some fall out in the transition that makes viewing the content from 2006 a bit more cumbersome. Please be advised that much of this content was developed through experimentation and read the corresponding dinner entry to every recipe to ensure the results were a success! However, I assure you that everything from 2007 onward is 100% credible :)