The gist

In 2009 I traveled to the UK. This was neither the first nor the last time and as my husband Jeremy and I had done our sight-seeing through English Heritage (which we love greatly) for our previous trip, we thought we should try something different this time around: we purchased memberships from The National Trust.

If you’ve visited the England and been to Wells or York or any of the multitude of fantastic historic and scenic cities you’ve probably passed the flowering hanging basket clad facades of the National Trust gift shops. Though they do sell a lot of the same sort of high street touristy souvenirs you’d expect, there are also treasures to be found within. We found ours in a discounted cookbook.

Farmhouse Cookery by Laura Mason and published by The National Trust retails for around £12.99 but we found it on sale for half that. It made it an easy impulse buy and my husband and I have been enjoying it ever since. The book separates its recipes to correspond with 12 regions in the United Kingdom. Some of these regions fall within county lines, others country lines, and a few are distinguished by districts and culture.

My challenge to is to get through every recipe within this book by August first of 2012. In order to accomplish this I shall need to create every dish, dessert, condiment, and beverage the book describes.

Initially I thought 12 regions should correspond to 12 months. However, as a large number of recipes are dependent on seasonal fruits, vegetables, nuts, and meats being available, it makes more sense to use the regions as tentative guidelines and then move many recipes around within our projected timeline depending on availability of ingredients. I shall endeavor to source these ingredients as locally as possible and make from scratch anything not readily available.

I know this sort of thing has been done before with more famous cookbooks and one may have resulted in a movie that was half enjoyable and half ghastly (you can work out which was which) but let’s forget that and concentrate on how totally fabulous real British country cooking is. And don’t even start with me on that whole, “English food is awful,” because it simply is not true. If you don’t believe me, just wait. I’ll show you.