Introductions Are In Order

Hi!  Thanks for finding your way over here.  My name is Nancy and I'm a wife, mother and part-time administrative assistant.  For years, I worked full-time and sadly, a lot of our dinners came from various places with menu boards.  But we moved last year, and our new place is in a smaller town, where not only are our restaurant choices fairly limited, but it's also a lot farther to go to eat out.  No problem, right?  I mean, I can cook, right?

Well...about that...

As it turns out, the majority of the meals I made were of the "what do we have and what can I make out of this?" variety.  Meaning we ate a lot of burritos and spaghetti and those boxed "helping" meals, if you get my drift.  Add that to the fact that my kids are in sports and scouts and music so we always seemed to be facing a time crunch in the evenings. 

So yeah, burritos and spaghetti and hamburger.  With some frozen pizza thrown in there for variety.

A few weeks ago, I found myself tearing a recipe out of the local newspaper when I thought "Why do I do this?  I never make any of this stuff.  It'll just sit with all the other recipes I've collected from newspapers and magazines and the Internet over the years,"  Right then, I decided.  I was going to start using those recipes.  If I put a little planning into it, and when you consider that I only work 3 days a week, I could do it.  I tossed around a few different ideas. 

Should I set a specific number of recipes to try?  The thought of 212 in 2012 came to mind.  But the vision of me whipping up 200 recipes on December 31, 2012 was not at all appealing.  (Because sometimes I don't follow through with things.) 

Should I find a cookbook and try all the recipes in it?  That's kind of been done.

So what I settled on was this:  I'm going to try new recipes.  Period.  No set number, no set meals.  I'm going to find my way out of the spaghetti, burrito and hamburger rut by taking this mess of cookbooks:

(and all those recipes available on the Internet) and start using them as something other than decoration for the top shelf of my pantry.

Yikes!  I should have at least straightened those up before posting a picture, huh?  At least now you can see what I'm up against.