the-cooking-rescue-kit - Cécile Briand

In order to find a solution to my complete inability to cook I asked all my friends, my family, my colleagues to give me their easy-to-cook-recipes, mostly with vegetables and that could fit in 5 sentences maximum.

Since they were short I managed to write them on memo-cards, and let chance decide what dish to prepare. My girls quickly got used to draw a card each Sunday evening and I go grocery shopping for the ingredients on Mondays.

I tested 200 recipes over 5 years and I kept 97 in the end.

65 main courses can be drawn and there are 32 bonuses to create a full meal (with apetizers, starters, desserts...) whenever guests are expected.

That's how I made it through thanks to this playful method! Since then I've been cooking every week and I don't get bored by it. I overcame the dread to cook since I foolproofed each recipe.

After a while, I managed to skip the “luck” part and started to use the index at the end of the notebook to choose a recipe depending on what I felt like eating or on the seasonal vegetables.

I wanted to share these foolproof recipes and this method with a as many people as I could.

The video hereafter was shot to promote an Ulule campaign. My goal was to fund the Cooking Rescue Kit, the first version of the notebook.

I didn't reach the crowdfunding goal however I was happy to go through this process and enough people participated to this campaign to create a limited-series of 100 copies. There is only a few left.

The cards and its box were made by a board-game editor. I added a self-made mini rescue cookbook. It would fit in one of the two compartments of the box.

On the video, you can see another version of the cookbook, the one I wanted to create at first.

A few months after the creation of the Cooking-Rescue Kit, I published Ma vie cylindrique through BoD, an on-demand service to make and distribute books. So I thought that my recipes deserved to be available online to everyone.

Then I decided to change the Kit into the Cooking-rescue cookbook. It features all the elements from the kit: the last pages contain the 65 recipe-cards as well as the box that can be cut and easily made using two matchboxes.

The two following videos show you how to do it.

The rescue cookbook