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!  

Go Big or Go Home: Gram's Birthday Dinner

As mentioned over at Go Somewhere That's Green, Gram turned 81 yesterday.

Initially, my parents wanted to have a family dinner of store bought fried chicken.  While I love fried chicken, my sister-in-law, Kristina, and I thought we could do better.  Anytime I plan a meal, it can not be simple.  I suppose it's the Italian running through my veins.  It isn't a real meal if the table isn't filled with food, leaving little to no space for things like plates, silverware, glassware, etc.

Here is the menu we planned:

Appetizer: shrimp cocktail, salad, Italian bread

Main Course: fresh lobster, London broil, roast chicken (Surf, Turf, and.....Air!)

Sides: butternut squash with kale, mashed potatoes, broccoli, Red Lobster biscuits

Dessert: strawberry shortcake, chocolate trifle

Kristina was the one who thought to add lobster to the menu.  In fact, it may have been the first suggestion out of her mouth when we began planning.  We made live lobster once before and she desperately wanted the opportunity to be the one to put the lobster into the pot.  For more about this first time experience go here.*

*Looking through my old posts always makes me realize how far my blog has come.  That said, don't judge the poor layout my blog had back then.

We picked up the lobster in the afternoon, then headed to my mom's to cook our feast.

Gram loves Red Lobster biscuits, so naturally they made the menu.  They are insanely easy to make and taste exactly like the real thing.

Here's the recipe:

Red Lobster Biscuits

Hubby found this awesome parody cookbook of the book Fifty Shades of Grey: Fifty Shades of Chicken.  Not only is it hysterical, the recipes are different from ordinary roaster chicken recipes such as herb roasted chicken which I'm pretty sure everyone on earth has some variation of.  We made the first recipe: plain vanilla chicken. 

Are you ready for it?

The spread made of vanilla, brandy, sugar, and butter is rubbed, get this, under the skin of the chicken and then roasted for a little over an hour.

I had planned our menu out by the minute and found that despite the vast number of items we were making, there was a lot of down time.

After the chicken was on, Kristina began chopping veggies for the salad, while I prepared the veggies and herbs for the lobster pot.



I love the fancy way of chopping cucumber that Kristina recently discovered.  If you haven't tried this before, drag a fork down the sides of the cucumber before slicing.  

My inspiration to make lobster came from the book/movie Julie and Julia.  While I'm sure there are other guides to steaming live lobsters, I find no reason to use anything other than Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking as my guide.

We didn't want to get too fancy, so I used the steaming portion of the recipe for Lobster Thermidor.  Three cups of white wine, 2 cups of water, with sliced carrot, onion, celery, and seasonings simmers together for about 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, the heat is turned up until the water reaches a rapid boil.

Cooking live lobster is ridiculously easy.  It sounds like something that would be difficult, terrifying, and intimidating, but it couldn't be further from that.

Oh yeah, except for the part where you have to put a LIVE lobster into a pot.

Kristina did so good, at first.  She picked the lobster up, she held it for a good minute....but then she chickened out.  I'm not sure if it was her conscience speaking to her over the murder she was about to commit or just the thought of plopping that bad boy into a pot of boiling water.*

*Note: Last time, the first lobster I put in the pot jumped.  It was terrifying.

Kristina placed the lobster back down on the shopping bag and I had to grab him, get over the previous terror I had faced, and take care of business.

I felt like a drill sergeant as I ordered Kristina to get the second lobster into the pot.

One way or another, she made it happen.

As the lobsters steamed (and no, there are no scary shrills or sounds that come from the pot during the 20 minute steaming time) we prepared the shrimp cocktails.

I thought about being overly ridiculous and buying the shrimp fresh, but the flash frozen bag of shrimp that was on sale seemed like a better choice, all things considered.

After five minutes of thawing in water, they were ready for assembly.

My mashed potatoes were divine, the butternut squash was sweet (the kale a little under cooked--that recipe to come another time), and the chicken was moist, roasted to perfection.

And this....the London Broil.  There isn't much you can do to a London broil to make it better than it is naturally.  It was probably a little rare for some folks preferences, however, in my house we like it rare so this was a thing of beauty.

Not bad for 81, right?

My grandmother loves anything strawberry.  I usually make this Strawberry Shortcake Trifle for her.  However, on my ever growing list of recipes to try was Pioneer Woman's Strawberry Shortcake.  I figured this was the time to do it.

The icing, instead of the typical whipped cream topping that is plopped on ordinary strawberry shortcake, was made of butter, powdered sugar, and cream cheese.  The three of the most sacred things in the world of baking.

It was surprisingly delightful.