New Goals, New Recipes!

New Year, new goals, right? I have been thinking about New Years resolutions the past few days, as I am sure most of you have. I have set several for myself personally, but what would I do for the blog and for my cooking? Last year I cooked through an entire Paula Deen cookbook- Paula Deen Celebrates! which was a lot of fun. Paula Deen is pretty much my hero! However, because I am from the South, that kind of food was not very challenging. It is what I grew up with and I already had a fairly good knowledge about those ingredients, recipes and techniques. I wanted to challenge myself a bit more this year. And because my blog is about “bringing the South to the Southwest” I thought I would do some Southwestern food. I want to learn about the ingredient, recipes and techniques indigenous to the area that I live in now.

Luckily, I got an amazing cookbook when Andrew and I went to Sedona, AZ for our first anniversary. It is called The New Southwest Cookbook. It is a collection of recipes from restaurants in the Southwest- Sedona, Scottsdale, Santa Fe, Tucson, Taos, St. George- restaurants from Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. Sadly, no Nevada. These are super gourmet, restaurant quality recipes, so they will challenge me- new techniques, new ingredients (rattlesnake, prickly pear, cactus leaves or achiote paste, anyone?) There are amazing and delicious recipes like garlic-sautéed lobster medallions with corn blinis and ancho crème fraiche, stuffed chicken mole, roasted garlic flan with pumpkin salsa and peach, chile and basil tart.



It would be a little crazy to take on the whole book, so here is what I am going to do- each month I am going to have a dinner party. I am going to make an appetizer, soup, entrée, side and dessert. It will be a lot of fun- what I loved about the Paula challenge was having an excuse to have people over so often. But it will also challenge my cooking skills. Stay tuned for my first tries later this month! And let me know- what are your New Years cooking resolutions?