Recipe Book Challenge

My sister-in-law, Mallory, and I were chatting recently about cooking.  She asked me if I had ever cooked every recipe in any of the recipes books I own.  I looked around at the books lining my kitchen, four different bookshelves beautifully organized with them, a few books sitting in my recipe stand, and recipes printed from the internet scattered about the room.

I have a lot of cookbooks.

I've read through most of them like they were fantasy novels.  I've marked recipes with scraps of paper, scribbled page numbers on post it notes, but I have never cooked through an entire book.

I suppose it seemed too much of a copycat of what Julie Powell did with Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  I loved the concept of her blog, the book, and the movie: Julie and Julia, and I slightly remember considering to do the same thing when I first discovered my love for cooking.  Then I looked through Julia Child's book and realized that a major chunk of her recipes were foods I have no desire to ever taste, let alone make myself.

I never even considered doing it with a cookbook more suited to my tastes.  

My cookbook obsession began with The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes From an Accidental Country Girl.  From the moment I picked it up from the author's remainders bin in Barnes and Nobles, I have been obsessed.  This book entirely changed my perspective on cooking.  While I thought I had made quite a few of the recipes, after going through and counting the total number of recipes in the book versus how many I actually have made here it what I discovered:

Total Number of Recipes: 65
Total Number of Recipes I have Made: 13

Thirteen???  I couldn't believe that in this staple cookbook of my kitchen I had only made thirteen of the recipes.

Even before I realized this, I had chosen this book as the one to start with, and yes, I stress the word start.  I have collected far too many recipe books to have not done this before.  I figure, if Julie Powell can commit to making 524 different French recipes in a year, I can certainly make a similar commitment--on a much smaller scale, of course.  The Pioneer Woman Cooks will be my trial run, my guinea pig, if you will.  My goal is to make all the recipes in this book by Christmas.  That's roughly six recipes per week, almost 1 recipe per day.

There are only 68 days left until Christmas---can you believe it?

The rules:
1. No substitutions.
2. If a recipe calls for 2 lbs of meat (which many do) I can cut the recipe in half since most nights I am only feeding Hubby and myself.
3. Pasta is the only allowed 'substitution' (as in using elbows instead of penne), and should be limited.
4. Every recipe will be blogged about.  Depending on their relation to one another they may occasionally be grouped together. 

I'm going to confess, I already got a head start before making this announcement.  Since Mallory was over last Saturday, I wanted to make the first two recipes of the challenge for her and my brother: Pico de Gallo and Guacamole.  Look for the post tomorrow!