The Recipes

My husband bought me the two volume set of the Art of French Cooking as a gift with our new kitchen. If you've ever read the cookbooks, the commentary and instructions are pretty funny - we spent one night reading some of them after dinner one night. (Exciting middle aged weekend nights over here....) But they are definitely old school. For example, the recipe for beef bourguignon says you take the bacon and cut off the rind.  Uh, rind? What? But, I mean, it's Julia Child - why would you use any other recipe than hers? I told my husband I was going to make it for him in the fall and that I would simply take the book to the butcher up the street, shove the recipe at them and ask for help.  But then I thought, I am going to need help to make it, so I lost my excitement.  

So, this post, which I intend on updating, will be my running list of recipes that I want to accomplish this year and hopefully, links to blog posts when I made them. Some will be author specific, likely Julia Child, and others will be recipes that I will then need to track down online.  If you have a good recipe for one or more of the items on this list without an author, please feel free to share. Some of these recipes are going to look "easy" or simple to people with any cooking experience, but, like I said, with my confidence shot, even "easy" recipes are a struggle for me.  Can't believe I just admitted that out loud.  

And I don't intend to just stick to these as what I put on here - these are just the recipes I want to accomplish this year while I try and improve my cooking skills. 

The Recipes

Julia Child's beef bourguignon

Lasagna (yeah, I know, this is pretty basic)

Baked Alaska

Lobster bisque

Bananas foster

Bread

Gnocchi

Fried chicken

Hummus (I made some weird cauliflower hummus once.... bad idea)

Steamed dumplings

Beef wellington

Pad thai 

Baklava (using the recipe from the Kokkari cookbook)

Shrimp and grits (using the Founding Farmers cookbook)