What's with the Crowing Coq Thing?

I love to cook , collect cookbooks, drink good wine and share food with friends. And, what can be better than to do it with friends who love to cook as much as I do? Eight to ten of us get together every 2 months to share a meal prepared from the same cookbook and then select a cookbook for our next dinner. My husband has a very large wine cellar that we could never drink up if we drank a bottle a day for the rest of our lives(i.e…a lot of grape juice!), so we pair each course with a bottle of wine from our cellar. What can be better than to drink our wine with people who love food and appreciate good wine? So there we are, 2 years later, with a cookbook club!

The "Crowing Coq" part of our club came about quite naturally actually. Our first dinner during the holidays in December included a "white elephant" gift exchange. A timer that looks like a laying hen but with an alarm that sounds like a rooster, was one of the gifts. The problem with this timer is that it somehow goes off whenever it wants to so at 3 a.m. you might hear a !!*#&*#! "cockadoodledoo" crowing from your kitchen!! It is now showing up at each holiday dinner and has moved on to it's third home, become our club mascot and part of our name....of course, being a gourmet cookbook club, we had to change it to "coq" ala coq au vin.

If you collect cookbooks like I do, you have books from which you have tried one, maybe two recipes. You have a few books that you return to all the time and the others collect dust on your shelves. What is so cool about a cookbook club is that you get to taste 8-15 recipes out of the same book without going through the trouble of actually preparing them. After each dinner, I dash home to write comments on each recipe page ranging from “yummy!” to “bland” or “pass” and/or add the improvements the cook made.

In 2006 we cooked from any cookbook from Lydia Bastianich, and Julia Child, our personal favorites, and a Mediterranean cuisine dinner. Our holiday dinner was all appetizers and desserts and spouses were invited to join us.

Last year, 2007, we cooked from Daniel Boulud’s Braise, Thomas Kellar’s The French Laundry Cookbook, Cindy Pawcyln’s Big Small Plates, from any gourmet-type magazine AND went on a field trip to the Love Apple Farm in Boulder Creek, CA and Manresa Restaurant (Michelin 2-star restaurant) in Los Gatos, CA. The Love Apple Farm raises food for Manresa and only this restaurant. Cynthia Sandberg raises over 100 varieties of heirloom tomatoes and some beautiful chickens (given our thing with "coqs!"). David Kinch prepared a 3-star dinner using the vegetables from the Farm. A field trip to a restaurant or food event has now become an annual thing. As you can see, we’ve grown over the year and our cookbooks became more sophisticated.

So far in 2008 we’ve had an 8-course dinner using Zov by Zov Karamardian. View the menu and photos of our Zov dinner in the March 1, 2008 blog. Each cook made comments about the recipe, shared what changes s/he made to make the entrée even better from the first time s/he tried the recipe. We also shared recipes we tried from the book that we didn’t like…or even hated! We’ll share those with you too so you don’t have to bother making the dish...that is, if your tastes are similar to ours.

There are also some Guidelines for the group so if you decide to form your own cookbook club, you can learn from our trials and errors over the past two years.

Bon appetit!