While running today

I had a brilliant idea about cookbooks: they should make a list of all the ingredients you will need for all the recipes in the book.

Like fennel...

[Such a strange vegetable...]

I don't know anyone (well maybe my foodie friends) who regularly stocks fennel in their fridge. I would probably only buy fennel to make one thing and then have to eat it for the next 2 weeks to make sure that it doesn't go bad...

Solution?

There can be with a short list of all of the strange ones that you only sometimes need (like fennel).  That way if it just so happens that fennel is on sale and you buy some then you can look at the list of strange ingredients you only sometimes need and know that there is something you can make with it!

Brilliant I say!

Another idea is to have a seasonal cookbook where there is 1 recipe a day for every day of the year (yes 365 recipes) and at the beginning of every "seasonal" section it can list what you can expect to find at your local produce store or farmers market that will be in the recipes for those months.

Cheers to great ideas while running!