I basked in the glory of not being required to bake anything on a schedule for about two weeks, and then I got bored. What can I say? I like to set goals.

The key is to find goals that push without demanding too much. I need enough structure to keep me accountable, but not so much that I feel resentful. I hope I’ve found that balance.

What I’ve decided to do is choose 24 dishes – 12 cooked and 12 baked – that have been marinating in the back of my brain for too long. These are recipes that I thought “YES!!! I want to make that, and as soon as possible”, when I first saw them, but then something has gotten in the way, time and again, sometimes for years. How many times am I going to think to myself that I should try making a dish at home before I just finally do it?

Not all of the recipes are difficult. Not all of them are even new to me; I’ve made versions of some of these dishes before, but haven’t found a recipe I think is The One. In some cases, I have specific recipes chosen; in others, only an ingredient or flavor.

I’ve assigned the dishes to months so I pace myself. (I’m not much of a procrastinator in projects like this; I would do the opposite and stress myself out by trying to finish them all by March.) And sometime, anytime, during that month, I’ll blog about those two recipes.

And that’s it. Two recipes per month, chosen by me, of dishes I’ve always wanted to make. How hard can this be?

Here’s the schedule:
January – asian lettuce wraps and black bean avocado brownies
February – ranch dressing and peanut butter butterscotch fudgy crisp rice sandwich bars
March – mozzarella and whole wheat chocolate chip cookies
April – dolmades and gougeres
May – mustard and focaccia
June – barbecued ribs and gelato
July – paella and honey ice cream
August – general tsao’s chicken and creamsicle whoopie pies
September – tomato tart with basil crust and poptarts
October – quinoa fritters and macarons
November – meatloaf and something chai-flavored
December – something with miso and gingerbread cookies

Fettuccine alfredo, nothing but cream, butter, cheese, and pasta, is a reminder that the occasional splurge is an absolute requirement.

Tomato soup has always been my favorite comfort food, and this recipe is so good that I can’t convince myself to try a different one.

Brown rice was the last whole grain I incorporated into my diet, and it’s all because of this method of cooking the rice like pasta, in lots of boiling water.

Baking bread with nothing but wild yeast was a decade-long goal of mine, and Tartine’s country bread came out even better than I could have imagined.

Greek yogurt dill dip makes the list not so much for the individual recipe, although I do love it, but because it was a turning point in my realization that substituting Greek yogurt for sour cream and mayonnaise was the answer to healthifying all sorts of creamy white dips and dressings.

I had to include summer berry pie because it’s one of Dave’s favorite desserts.

Chicken gyros have become a staple. Not only are they one of my favorite dinners to eat, it’s one of my favorite recipes to make.

Banh mi compete with chicken gyros for my favorite Sunday night meal. I love sandwiches!

Dulce de leche cupcakes are great, but it’s the dulce de leche buttercream that steals the show here.

Salted herbed roast turkey beats brined turkey any day – not only does it taste better, it’s easier.

Happy New Year!

I am a list maker. When I got it in my head to make a big turkey dinner just for me and Dave last year, I had just as much fun planning it as I did cooking it. Eating it was nice too, but that’s just the bonus.

The first step, and possibly my favorite, was to look for recipes. Because I knew I’d get a traditional turkey dinner on the real holiday, I had fun choosing new recipes. I edited each one for precisely how I was going to make it, not just adapting them for my tastes, but writing the directions for the number of servings I’d be making. I knew I’d have a lot to do when it came time to cook, so I wanted to do all of my thinking in advance.

Once my recipes were set, I could write a schedule for myself. I noted everything that I could do in advance and figured out when I would do it. I was fortunate that I had the day off from work the day before my big dinner, so I spent that whole day doing all of my prep. I made myself a detailed schedule for that day – which I was perpetually behind on, but that was okay because there were no deadline for that day; it was just prep.

Then I made a detailed schedule for the day of my dinner. I started with my dinner time and counted back from there. Basing my cooking schedule on the oven requirements helped me plan. Again, the idea here is to do all of the thinking beforehand, so that when you’re trying to greet guests, serve them drinks, and do inevitable troubleshooting, you know exactly what needs to be done. In your schedule, don’t forget to account for the time it takes transfer the food from the cooking part of the kitchen to the eating part of the kitchen. With as many courses as Thanksgiving feasts include, this is no small task.

I find it convenient to make my grocery list for a big meal by recipe, and then put it all together (and arrange by the route I take through the store; I’m hardcore). Finally, I note which pans and serving dishes I’ll need for each recipe; again, the idea is to make all decisions before Go Time so I’m not scrambling to wash my favorite saucepan at the last minute.

Of course, even the most careful planning can’t take into account your husband accidentally turning the oven off right as the turkey goes in. A positive attitude is an advantage too.

The attached Excel file has all of my plans in it. Feel free to use it as a template if you think it will help you plan. Over the next two weeks, I’ll blog each of the recipes I made.

Here’s the complete menu:
Breakfast: Steel-Cut Oatmeal with Maple Sautéed Apples
Snack: Glazed Pecans
Appetizer: Phyllo Cigars with Squash, Pancetta and Rosemary
Turkey: Salted Roast Turkey with Herbs
Gravy: White Wine Gravy
Stuffing: Cornbread Dressing with Roasted Root Vegetables
Potato: Yukon Gold and Sweet Potato Gratin
Vegetable: Cauliflower with Mustard Lemon Butter
Cranberries: Cranberry Sauce with Port and Dried Figs
Bread: Cheddar Puffs with Green Onions
Dessert: Maple Pumpkin Pots de Crème

Two years ago: Pork Chops Loco Moco
Three years ago: Pumpkin Pancakes

Butternut Squash Macaroni and Cheese – This has all of the creaminess and richness that I love in traditional regular macaroni cheese, with the added sweetness, color, and wholesomeness of winter squash.

Jalapeno-Baked Fish with Roasted Tomatoes and Potatoes – There are very few meals I make more than once a month, and this has become one. I like to make extra sauce to store in the freezer to make this meal even easier.

Mediterranean Pepper Salad – I went through a gyro phase last summer, and this salad started out as the perfect side dish and morphed into the perfect topping. I’m impatient for the weather to warm up enough to grill so I can start another gyro phase.

Roll-Out Sugar Cookie comparison – It’s so rare when my comparisons have a clear result, and I love when it happens. But after spending the holidays at my mother-in-law’s and surviving almost entirely on her perfect sugar cookies, I think a rematch with her recipe is in order.

How to adapt any bread to be whole wheat – I use this trick – just a few minutes to mix up flour, salt, and yeast the night beforehand – nearly every time I make bread.

Vodka Gimlet – I drank a lot of these this summer. And then too many one night in October, and I haven’t had once since.

Chicken Fajitas – Chances were good that if it was a Sunday evening during the summer, if I wasn’t making some sort of gyro, Dave and I were grilling these.

Garlic Mustard Glazed Skewers – I make these when I need to be reminded that recipes don’t have to be complicated to be perfect.

Whole Wheat Bagels – Combined with a mug of strong black tea, these bagels make up the best part of my workday.

Bolognese Sauce – Despite this being one of those dreaded comparisons with no winner, it resulted in a freezer full of one of my favorite foods.

9 favorites:

Chopped salad – I know it’s just salad with a bunch of stuff in it. But it’s exactly the way I like salad – evenly sized ingredients with a high ratio of other stuff compared to the lettuce. Plus it has avocado in it, and that makes everything better.

Red velvet cake comparison – That was a whole lot of red velvet cake. It’s been about 11 months, and I think I’m just about ready to make red velvet cake again. Soon. And now I know exactly which recipe to use.

Pot roast – Pot roast sounds so unassuming, not at all like something that would stand out as a favorite, but the addition of a bit of red wine gives it a richer, more complex flavor than traditional pot roast.

Orange oatmeal currant cookies – One of the first recipes I made from Tartine’s cookbook, and it knocked my socks off. I love how it’s familiar – an oatmeal cookie with dried fruit – but the orange zest and currants provide a more interesting flavor.

Strawberries and cream pie – Um, cream cheese, sugar and heavy cream topped with fresh strawberries and drizzled with chocolate. Duh.

100% whole wheat bread – I haven’t made this exact recipe again, but I have adapted the technique to all sorts of other breads. Soaking whole grains before kneading them into other bread ingredients makes the final dough much easier to work with, and the baked bread is more tender and flavorful than it would be without the soak.

Pizza – Years of making pizza almost every Friday night has helped me refine my recipe until it’s exactly how I like it.

Bourbon pound cake – Pound cake has been my baking nemesis for years, but not anymore.

Brussels sprouts braised in cream – Okay, so not the healthiest way the eat vegetables, but certainly the tastiest.

6 honorable mentions:

Brioche plum tart – Part of one of my favorite days this year.
Farmer’s market salad with goat cheese – lettuce, potatoes, goat cheese, yum!
Lemon meringue cake – What a fun birthday cake this was.
Brown rice with black beans – Finally, I figured out how to cook brown rice!
Slice and bake brown sugar cookies – They’re sorta like chocolate chip cookies, but a lot prettier (and without chocolate).
Herbed lamb chops – This amazing meal has started Dave on a big lamb kick.

Last year my goals were 1) more easy, healthy dinner recipes, which I probably didn’t do a great job with; 2) more effort into taking photos, and I’m satisfied with my progress there; and 3) getting up a Basics of Food Photography page, which I managed to do (although I’ve been working on an update to it).

My goals this year are to publish more blog entries – around 4 per week instead of 3 – and redesign my site, hopefully by learning enough about web design to do it myself.

Here’s to another great year! Happy New Year!

9 favorites (in chronological order based on posting date)

Country Crust Bread – I make this all the time. I generally keep some in the freezer, either as a sliced loaf or as rolls. It’s such a perfect sandwich bread – tender, sturdy, and flavorful. And it’s a great recipe for beginner bread bakers because there’s nothing tricky about it and the instructions are so detailed.

Salmon Pesto Pasta – Still Dave’s favorite meal ever. I’ll be making this for his birthday next week. I’ve been making it fairly often lately with storebought pesto because it’s so easy that way. But Dave and I agree that it’s best with homemade pesto.

Bagels – I wish I could keep a supply of these in the freezer all the time, because I like them so much more than storebought. That doesn’t always happen, but I am planning to make a batch tomorrow!

Cinnamon Rolls – This recipe is pieced together from my favorite aspects of a few other recipes. It has just the right balance of tender, sweet, spicy, and rich for me, with the added bonus that almost all of the work can be done the night before the rolls are baked.

Red Beans and Rice – It’s so simple, but I look forward to eating it every time I make it.

Crockpot Pulled Pork – This is by far the most popular recipe on my site. And for good reason – this pork is seriously amazing. I like to keep a supply in the freezer, especially since the recipe makes so much.

Pigs in a Blanket – Gourmet eating at its best. Or not. But they were really good, plus I like the photos quite a bit. My sister often keeps some of these in her freezer for easy lunches for her toddler.

Soba Salad with Feta and Peas – I was surprised by how much I liked this, but it was so good that I’ve made it several times. It’s a weird combination of ingredients that somehow meld together perfectly.

Sushi Bowls – I’m still so proud that I came up with my own recipe. I just took a bunch of my favorite sushi ingredients and mixed them up in a bowl instead of dealing with making rolls. It’s far easier, but just as delicious.

6 honorable mentions
Macaroni and Cheese – last time I made this, I couldn’t stop eating it
Fish Tacos – easy, healthy, and so tasty
Scotch Eggs – definitely not healthy, but worth it
Blueberry Poppy Seed Brunch Cake – tender and lemony with lots of blueberries
Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic – best chicken I’ve ever eaten
Pumpkin Bourbon Cheesecake – I haven’t stopped thinking about this since I made it

I have a couple goals (the word “resolution” seems unpopular this year) for my blog for 2009.

More easy, healthy dinner recipes – Did you notice that of the 15 favorites I picked from the last year, only one is a dessert? But about half the entries in my blog are desserts. I want to focus more on dinner recipes because those are the ones that a lot of people need new ideas for.

More effort into taking photos – One reason that a lot of dinner recipes don’t get posted is that I’m too lazy or rushed to take pictures of dinner. I have this idea that the cooking is the first priority, but I need to keep in mind that photography is an important hobby to me as well.

Basics of Photography page – I’ve had this in the works since August, and it’s almost done now; I just need to make the final push on finishing it. It’ll be for photography beginners, but that’s where I was a year ago, and I think I’ve learned a lot since then.

I learned a lot about cooking, photography, and having a blog in 2008. Here’s to making as much progress in 2009! Happy New Year!

How did your Thanksgiving turn out? Did you have any mishaps? Did you finish cooking at the time you’d planned? Was there any drama?

Dave and I are spending Thanksgiving by ourselves for the first time this year, and we went for the traditional dinner. We decided we should eat at 4:00, so I scheduled the cooking so we’d eat at 3:30, giving myself some contingency time, and we ended up eating 4:45. So typical for me. But, other than that and an unfortunately large span of time between the green beans being done and the carrots being done, everything came together smoothly and was quite tasty.

The most dreaded part of the meal for me, even more so than rinsing a 12-pound turkey in a too-small sink, was carving the turkey. I am not at all good at it. The short instructional video I watched made it seem so easy, and said that the carved turkey could be displayed just as nicely as the whole bird. Well, that certainly didn’t happen. My “carved” thigh meat was ready to be put straight into turkey salad sandwiches.

But it tasted good – the turkey had picked up a wonderful bit of allspice flavor from its brine. The stuffing was great even though I left it in the oven far too long, and the rolls were buttery and sweet, although weirdly flaky. The green beans and carrots were delicious, the potatoes were pleasantly tangy from the buttermilk, and gravy, oh, the gravy. I want to pour it over everything. Now, we’re finishing up a nice Pinot Noir, and I, for one, am thinking about pie. I’ve been thinking about pie all day.

Ah, that was possibly the best vacation ever. Six days with nothing to do but play in the waves, take pictures of my nephews, and drink beer on the beach. Everyone got along at least as well as could be expected, and I found that family vacations are that much more enjoyable when my husband is there too.

Shortly before I left, I was tagged by Elizabeth for the meme that’s been going around.

What were you doing 10 years ago?

Ten years ago I had just finished my first year of college, and I was spending the summer back at home working at a shoe store. I remember going hiking with my high school friends and my college roommate coming over once a week to eat tomato soup and watch TV.

What are 5 things on your to-do list today?

1 – Balance the checkbook and pay bills
2 – See a movie (We’ll do rock-paper-scissors to decide if we see Indiana Jones or Sex and the City)
3 – Pick through my pictures from the vacation, deleting the blurry or redundant ones
4 – Work on some job search correspondence
5 – Go to the bookstore and drink a cappuccino

5 snacks that I enjoy

1 – Ripe, seasonal fruit
2 – Cheese and crackers
3 – Beer (hey, it’s filling)
4 – Crudite, especially cauliflower, with dip
5 – Treats!  Cookies, brownies, muffins, any of that…

Things I would do if I was a billionaire:

1 – Various donations and such
2 – Buy a house on the beach
3 – Buy a boat and spend tons of time on it
4 – Pay for all of my nephews and nieces (and I suppose my kids when I have them) to go to the college of their choice
5 – Never work a 9-to-5 desk job

Places I’ve lived:

Buffalo Grove, IL
Hafr Al Batin, Saudi Arabia
Carlsbad, NM
Albuquerque, NM
Las Cruces, NM
(Carlsbad, NM, again)
South Bend, IN
Binghamton, NY
Syracuse, NY
Philadelphia area, PA

Jobs I’ve had:

Cashier and cook at a pizza joint
Stocker at a shoe store
Tutor during college
Intern at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
Cashier at Blockbuster
Teaching assistant while working on my master’s degree
Research assistant while working on my PhD
Adjunct professor

Since I’m late getting to this meme and it looks like most people have participated, I’m not going to tag anyone.