Week 1: Beginnings

I have plenty of time consuming hobbies in my life, but recently I have felt the need to complete my 50's housewife persona by encouraging my budding love of cooking. This has been difficult to do since my creativity in the kitchen has fallen to an all time low. We were living off crackers and store-bought cookies a week ago.

Rather than increasing my creativity by subjecting myself to the chore of finding FoodNetwork shows on the internet (since we don't have cable), I decided to take a page from the movie Julie & Julia and cook through a cookbook. But instead of Julia Child's cookbook, I went for something more pedestrian- the 2009 Taste of Home cookbook my mom got me for Christmas 2 years ago. Everything I've tried from there up to this point has been good to the point of gorging, plus the ingredients are not exotic and the recipes are simple.

So I did some research, dividing things into categories, looking for ingredients, reading recipes. And I figured that I'd have to cook approximately 9.4 recipes a week to get through the entire book in one year. That seems ridiculous until you realize that 2 recipes for one meal isn't unreasonable, so 3 meals a week, a dessert, breakfast on Saturday, and a treat for Game Night on Fridays, and that's 9. Which leaves plenty of time during the week for consuming leftovers. Result=culinary bliss.

Well, that was the idea, anyway. As I tend to do, I started this new goal on my new year--my birthday, which was on a Sunday this year in July, which made calculating weeks pretty easy.

Recipes to Go: 507 500

Weeks to Go: 52 51

Recipes Made This Week

Golden Corn Quiche

Special-Occasion Chocolate Cake

Chicken Fingers with Lemon Sauce

Lemon-Butter New Potatoes

Corny Lettuce Salad

Taco Salad

Simply-a-Must Dinner Rolls

The bliss part has been true thus far. Let's start at the beginning, Sunday. I made this delicious quiche:

and this magnificent cake.
Why yes, that is homemade ganache.

We had to cut the slices really thin so people didn't explode.

The rest of the week was tricky since we were flying to New York on Thursday morning. But I still found time to make the most delicious lemon sauce with the best fried chicken The Husband has ever had, lemon potatoes and a corny salad.
The dipping sauce definitely stole the show that night.

Then the next night we made taco salad. Really, really, really yummy taco salad that seems overly spicy to me, until I remembered that I did have two large, annoying cankor sores that emphasized the spiciness.
Not the best picture, but The Captain loved it, as did Grandma, my sister-in-law, and her little girls who were house sitting for us. I hear the leftovers were also good.

Also pictured is the dinner roll. I've never made crescent rolls that didn't come from a can before. I didn't know I could do that. And best of all, they weren't that hard, and they were really good.

So, not quite 9 recipes, but considering I was three days short, I think 7 is respectable. Plus, with all the holidays coming up, I'll make up for lost time, I promise.