THE FINAL COOKDOWN

Dear 0 followers,

My name is Victoria and I am a twentysomething newlywed living in Austin, Texas. My husband Ramon is also a twentysomething newlywed living in Austin, Texas. Once upon last Christmas, my wonderfully talented grandfather--we’ll call him PP--gave me (us) a cookbook of his favorite family recipes. They are called VG, which means they have been deemed to be Very Good by my grandmother. It is one of my (our) most treasured gifts. Sadly, the only culinary actions around our place as of late have been ordering pizza and justifying “high protein” peanut butter and ice cream concoctions. Oh, and actually jumping out of bed in sheer terror at 5:30am last Tuesday when I heard someone put a Chinese food menu on our front door. Those things count.

Every day, the cookbook sits stovetop, flipped open to a recipe for crawfish etouffee that looks absolutely scrumptious and it just sits there and taunts me. “Hey there, Vic! How was your day at work? Feel like cooking some dinner? It’s crawfish season, you know. Oh, you’re tired today. You’ll try tomorr-- ha! How gullible do you think I am? I know your game. Go ahead. Reach for that jar of queso in the fridge and go watch Oprah. It’ll be our little secret. Except I will tell all of the other recipes in this book. Who can also talk.”

So why THE FINAL COOKDOWN? I promise I won’t type that in all caps every time. Well, we are COOKingDOWN through PP’s entire cookbook through the remaining months on our lease. And who among us hasn’t derived a little epicurean inspiration from Europe every now and then? Sidenote: Can we talk about how bands named after places really oughta make a comeback for comedy’s sake? Anyway, if you decide that you want to read about our cooking adventure, we suggest you bookmark us and don’t fumble our URL in an 80s rock daze and accidentally reach this guy. Regardless. We have lived in our apartment for more than two years and have cooked less than a dozen real, honest-to-goodness, non-microwaved, non-ice-cream-involved meals in that time. It’s pathetic. Before we get some fabulous new place we must get acquainted with our tiny kitchen. If it can be done here, it can be done anywhere.

THE GOAL: Cook all of PP’s recipes, Julie & Julia style.
THE DEADLINE: 8 months from today. June 1, 2010.
THE FINAL COOKDOWN: 100 recipes and 243 days to go.