Let the Excitement Begin!!!

This morning I got an email from Jennifer at Sweet as Pie Cooking Club with our list of recipes for the month of January 2012. I am giddy with excitement! In this club, we are going to follow recipes from  The Pioneer Woman.   She does a show on Sunday mornings on The Food Network and she has her own blog along with a few cookbooks. Once I found out I was going to do this, I purchased on of her books for my iPad. The last time I read through a cookbook was… well, never. Last night, I found myself reading her cookbook from cover to cover. I even found myself reading some of comments that she wrote out loud to my husband (DMS) while he was watching football.  One of things I really like about her recipes are there common sense easy to make recipes and most ingredients are things you already have at your house.  In addition, DMS is an extremely picky eater. I believe he will like most of things in these cookbooks!!  That's a no brainer for me!!.

The first my recipes for the month is a shrimp scampi. One thing about DMS is that he hardly eats anything that comes out of the water, whether it's the ocean or the lake. However, he has recently added shrimp and crab legs to his repertoire of foods that he will eat occasionally.  In fact, he has even tried making a shrimp scampi himself a few times, so I'm really excited to try this recipe and see how it compares to the one that he has made.

Another one of our recipes is quiche. I'm not really a huge fan of eggs in general, but I am interested to try this dish.  In theory, I pretend I like eggs because to me they represent everything about breakfast… a meal that I love.  I always think I will like them every time that I or someone else prepares them, however, I often end up wishing I hadn't put so many on my plate. One thing I had hoped to get out of this cooking club was to encourage myself to try making things that I wouldn't normally make. This quiche is going to be an excellent example of that.

The third recipe we are going to make is Twice Baked Potatoes. I love these and they were one of my favorite things my mom cooked while I was growing up. We didn't have them that often and as an adult, I've never made them. My husband swears up and down he has made them since we've been married, however I have no recollection of that. This is one of the recipes I'm most excited about. I hope I can make them as well as my mom (or as well as my husband claims he were the ones he made :-) ).  This recipe came from her cookbook, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl, page 152. 

The last recipe for the month is Chicken Tortilla Soup. I love soup! Especially in the winter and today it's dreary and ugly in Georgia, a perfect day for soup. Right now, we have two or three soups we make here on a regular basis in the winter. I'm 'soup'er excited to see what this soup will taste like and to see if we can add it to our menu of soups! My favorite thing about soup is that you can double or triple the batch and make enough to freeze... then pull it out of the freezer on the days when you don't feel like cooking or have the time to cook!  Yeah!   I have a lot of these days... the ones where I don't feel like cooking... however, I'm hoping this new adventure into the land of cooking and blogging will change my feelings towards cooking.

On that note, I'm off for now. Tonight I'm in going try this chicken tortilla soup and tomorrow I'll let you know how it tasted… Wish me luck!