Here goes!

In 10 months and 28 days I'm going to marry my best friend and roommate, Shane. Being the old-fashioned girl that I am at heart, I feel that I should at least attempt to learn how to cook before our wedding. So that is what I am going to do!

I got this idea from the book and movie about The Julie/Julia Project. Now let's get one thing straight: Julie knew how to cook before she started. The pages of the Betty Crocker Basic Cooking book are terrifying to me. The pages of Julia Child's cookbook would leave me in tears. A raw chicken has never set foot in my kitchen. Purchasing raw ground meat, storing it in my refrigerator for a few days fully intending to cook, and then throwing it out when it went bad is the closest I have come to cooking. This is going to be a crash course.

My plan is to cook some of the recipes from the book at least once a week, probably on Sundays so we can eat the leftovers during the week. This weekend I am going to visit Shane's family, so I think I'll start simple with a dessert. His parents usually cook for us, and I'm not one to turn down a home-cooked (by someone else) meal!

Tonight, I had two donuts (this is a rarity, but Shane brought them home from the grocery store for me today and I couldn't resist) and two slices of leftover cold pizza for dinner. I must admit, I hit an all-time low. I fully intend to turn that around starting this weekend!

The whole cook book, cover to cover, includes:

-13 main dish salads, sandwiches, and soups

-11 pasta favorites

-25 main dishes, meat to meatless

-16 great for grilling (we don't even have a grill, so we're either going to have to cook some of this on a George Foreman grill, or get a tiny Weber for our tiny balcony)

-23 side salads and veggies

-14 snacks and sweet treats

-3 get-together menus (one of these is Thanksgiving dinner, which would be REALLY ambitious for me... maybe we can do something other than force mom to cook it all for the 3 of us this year?)

So, in total, there are 105 recipes. That's about 10 recipes a month until the wedding... We'll see how this goes!!