The challenge was titled 'Let's start at the very beginning' as Dom of belleaukitchen had chosen a very straight forward request to randomly choose a book and then randomly open it to a recipe, simple!
I have rather a lot of books so to make a genuine random choice I need a bit of help. I log most of my books on two websites, the Eat Your Books site which has been fantastic for finding recipes and pulling together various sources from books, magazines, internet blogs and random bits of paper into a single resource. The other list is on LibraryThing is more of a catalogue and although there is less reason to keep going with the LibraryThing now it was where I started so I still keep it up to date.
It was the Librarything list that helped me out with this challenge as each book's record is numbered within the system. So I checked up on the latest number of books I had and then opened up Excel. I quickly typed in the random function giving it the range 1-913 and got the answer back, book number 282. A quick flick back to LibraryThing reveals that the book randomly selected was The Roux Brothers 'French Country Cooking'
Immediate panic set in because most of the recipes in this book call for quite hard to get ingredients. I then checked the start and end page of the recipes,10-250, and popped this range into the random function.
Oops,' Quenelles of Pike'!
Now I guess Dom would say I cheated now as rather than try and adapt this I did another spin of the random selector. The next spin puts me on a page of text about one of the regions and then third time lucky I hit on Petits Poivres Limouxin or rather more simply black pepper crackers.
These are a beautifully simple but moreish buttery cracker that the authors recommend are served with drinks, so that is what I did.
I am a day late posting this but having lost my original photo I had to bake up some more and I know that is a not much of an excuse but I never was good at deadlines.
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