First post...

So this is my first post on my first blog - scary, exciting...

I first watched Julie and Julia, a film adapted from a book about Julie Powell's food blog which details her experience of cooking her way through the cook book - Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a couple of years ago and loved it instantly.  The adventure and challenge of cooking for a blog interested me and I started to think about doing my own.  At the time I was in the middle of Masters in Education and knew that it might take over my life if I started it then but, nevertheless, started to consider recipe books and ideas that I might use as inspiration for my forthcoming project.

Last Summer I came across Jamie's Italian book in a charity shop in Ulverston, Cumbria and had planned to cook my way through it, blogging about it as I went.  However, having visited the restaurant recently in Milton Keynes and not liking the crunchy spag bol I have since decided against this idea.  More recently, I considered 1 year - 100 recipes but it's been done before.  So I had to think up something new.

I have decided on this idea as it enables me to explore and cook recipes that I haven't cooked before, it has a structure, this being the route around the world taken by Phileas Fogg, it will include flavours from a variety of countries and finally it allows me to adapt and share ideas and photos.

Where possible I aim to use recipes that have healthy choices.  I'm not guaranteeing that they'll be low-fat but I will cook them with my waist-line in mind so will use healthy alternatives if available and will limit quantities of salt and added fat as I go along.  I also aim to use online recipes so that hyperlinks can be included in my posts.  This will also give me an opportunity to explore the vast array of recipes out there instead of printed recipes books.

Saying that, I would like to add that I love inventing recipes and generally use my kitchen as a ready, steady, cook experience whereby I make something up using whatever I have in the kitchen.  For inspiration, I use, love and would highly recommend the following two books: How to cook without recipes and The flavour thesaurus.  Both of these books detail tried and trusted flavour combinations to support recipe-free cooking.

Having cooked without recipes for so long I have become used to cooking the same flavour combinations for over a decade and want to discover new ones.  The best way to do this seems to be to use recipes and hence this blog.

I haven't decided how many recipes i'll use from each country and don't want to dictate how everything will go here as this will restrict the exploration and excitement of it all so will just see how it works out.  I will, however, state that I will make this journey over the year and aim to return to the UK by the end of December 2012.  So with that in mind I better get exploring, cooking and eating...