Back to Business – Let’s Cook!

New year!  New blog posts right?  Who am I kidding .. I’ll probably forget about my lonely little blog by about February, but I’m back for the moment and I have a sleeping baby, so let’s talk food!

I get in a rut sometimes on what I’m in the mood for, so I thought I’d try something different.  As you well may know, I’m a Rachael Ray fanatic.  I have a fairly large collection of her cookbooks, and I love that I can cook a well balanced, healthy meal from scratch in about 30-40 minutes every single night. 

Now her cooking takes some time to get used to.  Sometimes you have a lot going on at once and you need to learn the method.  You have to be able to look ahead and see that there’s no point in cutting up all those veggies before you even start cooking because you’ll have about 5 minutes of free time to cut them while your ground beef is cooking.  You can’t be afraid to have 3 pots of yummy simmering goodness going at once. 

Anyway, I’ve decided to go back through her cookbook “365: No Repeats!” cookbook.  It’s delightful!  The recipes are arranged in a pretty random order. The idea is that you can cook your way from front to back and have a new meal each day.  Now for those of you that absolutely need organization, there is also a category list in the front if you specifically want to find pasta, chicken or dinner for 2.

It also has a lot of “swap out” recipes.  You learn the technique on how to make the meal in the first recipe, then you swap out 3 or 4 ingredients for 3 or 4 new ones and voila!  Completely new dinner! 

So my plan is to go from front to back and really try some new things.  Now,  I reserve the right to skip things that I know dear hubby and I don’t like.  So I won’t get through 365 of them, but I’ll get through a fair number right?

Want to try it out?  I’ll try to get as many recipes and pictures up as I can, but with a 5 month old – no promises that I’ll remember, so if I post a recipe title that looks awesome and you want the recipe – tell me about it!

Happy cooking!
Until the next time …
~The girl behind the lama