The husband is out the door to the police academy, sanity somewhat in check, and I am ready to start my cooking conquest as of tomorrow night. When I began this idea, I was prepping for 70 different recipes. That soon went down the toilet after realizing that would be a new item every night - doesn't leave much room for error or freedom during the week. So then I reduced it to 50 recipes which would leave the weekend open for going out, or would allow me to switch around nights and not have to cook every single night after I got home from work. As the last few days have ticked down and I've tried my best to come up with 50 recipes, I appear to be stuck at 45 recipes, including Fried Green Tomatoes which may not work out if I can't find any green tomatoes in the dead of winter. And this was even after I poured through the last Southern Living and asked the husband what he wanted to eat when he gets home this coming Friday night. It's an oldie but a goodie. Just a small handful of the recipes I'm making are ones I have made before, but this is my blog and I say an old recipe still counts. So, nyah-nyah-nyah.
One of my first projects will be to clean off my kitchen counter near the stove. It's currently cluttered with mail, opened and unopened, small appliance chargers, random junk, and a large meat grinder that has not been used in many months. That will be the first thing to go. I can't cook if I have a cluttered space. Next, I need to pick out the recipes I'll have this week. I already have Friday out of the way - Hot Chicken Casserole, a request from the husband and his great-aunt's recipe. For the others, I suppose I could choose four numbers between 1 and 45, and the corresponding page would be the recipe to cook for the week. That sounds like it might work.
...picking numbers randomly...
Okay, I chose 6, 21, 30 and 39. The corresponding recipes for those page numbers are:
6. Mexican Chicken Casserole - Okay, I'm happy with that.
21. Grilled Chicken with Green Chile sauce - No problem there. Two chicken dishes already, though. I just won't cook them one right after the other.
30. Grilled Middle Eastern Meatballs - Cool. We went to a local Mediterranean restaurant earlier this week and they had this on the menu. I'm excited about trying this.
39. Smoky Shrimp and Parmesan-Polenta Cakes - I happen to already have a tube of polenta on hand and since I'll only use half of it for this recipe, I'll have to use the other polenta recipe soon.
Next thing is to make a grocery list and go shopping. I guess I'll see this week if my menus will be expensive, or if I can trim it back any. I'm already a coupon person, so I know that will help keep costs down a little. Also, I'll be taking lots of this stuff as leftovers for lunch the next day, so I won't need lots of lunch-type food.
This starts tomorrow! I'm ready.
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