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A Challenge, Declared. A Doldrum, Broken. Let It Be Done.

John Liu
11 years ago

The thread about cooking doldrums has got me thinking.

The best way I know to break free from the doldrums has always been to identify and take on a cooking challenge. A dish that you want to make, have never made, are frightened of making, lack the skills to make, and may well be unable to ever make.

Assault the castle, struggle and burn and swear, labor mightily and bring forth to the table your culinary bete noire, edible or not. At the end of it all, you will have broken something - maybe a nail, maybe crockery, or your heart, but surely your cooking doldrum as well.

I suggest, for those of us twisting in the doldrums, that we each declare and accept such a cooking challenge. The precise dish will be different for each of us. I'm not yet sure what mine will be. It must be worthy. Give it some thought, and come back here and post your own personal challenge. We can then follow our ups and downs as we each battle our declared dish.

Success will be sweet and effusively celebrated with full photographic documentation. Failure must be glorious, I mean Charge Of The Light Brigade style glorious, shining sabers plunging at a wall of cannon. As the great Eddy Merckx declared before one of his early victories, his plan that day was to mourir sur le velo, to die in the saddle. If your creation bursts into flame on the burner, collapses at the table, or achieves total inedibility, for our purposes that will be a moral victory. Our ultimate target, after all, is not a dish, but a doldrum.

Will any join me? Face your deepest fears in the kitchen? Enter the valley of Isengard and bake Orthanc as a four foot layer cake?

"Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it,

is . . . As always, should you or any member of your I.M.

Force be caught or killed, the secretary will disavow

any knowledge of your actions. This tape will

self-destruct in five seconds."

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