New Year's Resolution

Extending the Table: A world community cookbook: recipes and stories from Argentina to Zambia in the spirit of More-with-Less 

The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Dinnertime: comfort classics, freezer meals, 16-minute meals, and other delicious ways to solve supper

One of my easiest, and yet most-disliked chores is figuring out what to make for dinner. Menu-planning sounds like it should be something I'd enjoy - I love planning and thinking ahead and being organized, and I usually like cooking, but somehow menu planning is just not my thing. Who knows why, but sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and writing down what we're going to eat the next week, so that I can figure out what to buy at the store, is just awful.

In the spirit (but not much else) of "Julie and Julia" (a movie, one well worth watching), I'm going to cook my way through two cookbooks in 2016. Unlike the true story in which a woman cooks her way through Julia Child's French cookbook and makes herself do it every single day and does every single recipe and blogs about every one of them, I plan to do this project a little more sanely. Each week I'll choose one thing from each cookbook to make for one of our dinners that week. I'm not going to go in order and I'm not going to make every single thing from either book, but I do plan to try to stretch myself a little bit and try things I might normally skip.

I received both cookbooks as Christmas gifts this year, and they are very different from one another, so we should have plenty of variety. And since these will take care of 2-4 (I figure we'll have leftovers sometimes) meals per week to figure out, and Andrew plans to cook dinner once a week, I'm down to only having to deeply ponder my options for another 1-4 meals. Since I'll probably have to buy some ingredients for my cookbook dishes, then it makes the others easier to figure out; I'll just think about something we like that involves those things I'll have around. Meal planning in 2016 is looking a lot brighter!