2021: The year of the Random Menu

Let's have another crack at this, shall we?

I'm still not entirely sure why my creative juices ran dry somewhere in the middle of last August. Partly it was a sense that - while the low infection numbers in the summer months allowed us to at least approximate some aspects of normal life - my internalised impetus for resurrecting The Random Kitchen had run along the lines of "OK, I'll do this while we wait for parkrun/theatre/unproblematic foreign travel to come back", and contrary to initial foolish hopes, none of those things were showing any genuine signs of returning. Could I really persist with a weekly blog called "Lockdown Edition" if what I'd actually committed to was an "Until We Return To Normality Edition" and there was no hint of normality on the horizon?

Combine that with a general lack of drive and concentration ever since the unpleasantness first began (I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise to my bandmates for my near-complete inaction on the music front, too), and a couple of relatively underwhelming recipes with limited "fun content" potential was probably all it took to finish me off.

(There was actually an unwritten Week 19 post. It would have involved this:

 

 

...and, well, yeah. There's really only so much mileage you can get out of a wrap.)

But I do love writing The Random Kitchen.

Or perhaps it's fairer to say that I love having written it. It's a bit like running, in a way: reaching the end point is absolutely worth it, even if the things you need to do along the way can be a bit of a pain sometimes.

Plus (and believe me, I am not a humblebragger by nature, but) some of you have said the loveliest things about the blog and how you hope it comes back at some point. Never with any pressure attached, of course - and don't worry, such feedback only ever makes me feel motivated, hence really wanting to get things back on the road in some form.

So I sat down and had a think about how I could make a 2021 edition of The Random Kitchen happen, with all the fun and bewilderment that underpins the project but without it feeling like a weekly task that "has" to be checked off the to-do list, no matter what else is going on.

And here's what I came up with: The Random Menu.

The main change is that it'll be monthly instead of weekly, giving me a bit of wiggle room in terms of when I get round to doing it and writing about it. But to make up for that, there'll be more content each time, and hence more potential for hilarious kitchen disasters.

I'll be firing up the trusty random number generator as always - only this time I'll be using it to find us a starter, a main course, and a dessert. I'll then cook this three-course meal and blog about it as usual, including all the unappealing photographs of beige mush that keep you coming back to this page.

Of course, if any of the three recipes are particularly outlandish or ridiculous, I can and will give them their own separate post - there's little more fun than giving a cookbook author the kicking they deserve - while anything that's a bit on the dull side can just get a few paragraphs as part of a longer blog, rather than me having to pretend like I have any new and exciting insights to share about grilled chicken.

I mean, I couldn't even be bothered to focus the thing properly

In the interests of honesty, I cannot claim that I will necessarily make all three recipes on the same day - as much as we're boys with an appetite, there's still only two of us in this household - but it'll always be over the course of the same weekend or so, to ensure reasonable verisimilitude. Either that or I'll have to start look for willing local victims to help us out with the leftovers...

Incidentally, after this week's food shop (in which I'll pick up the ingredients for the January menu), we intend to switch to online grocery deliveries for a while. Whether this is still the case by the time of the February blog remains to be seen, largely depending on whether the newest restrictions succeed in making the outside world feel a bit less scary. But if it is, you can expect the "hunting in Lewisham Asda for alternative ingredients" element of the Random Kitchen experience to be replaced by "what entirely inexplicable substitutes will I be given in my delivery this time?". Fun!

Happy New Year to you all. Let's eat some weird stuff.