A whole new me: Part 2

Have you been sitting on the edge of your seat since my last post?  Are you just dying to know what I'm going to do?  If your answer is yes, Woohoo!  If your answer is anything less than yes, just smile and nod so I feel better.

Growing up, my mom had a small set of meals that she cooked for dinner and they all pretty much fit into the same box (that's not to say that they were all made out of a box...).  There really wasn't a lot to learn but I can cook a piece of chicken and I make a pretty mean meatloaf.  Sadly, other than that, I don't know how to make very many other meals.  It's become quite a joke amongst my friends that I don't cook and even if I do make something, it's not something you actually want to eat.  Over five years ago, I married a foodie who LOVES to cook.  That was GREAT when we were young and the only two people in our house, because I got home from work much later than he did, so he made all of our meals.  Fast forward to now and as the primary breadwinner in our bigger family, he works very long hours and is often home very late.  Those are the "out loud" facts, but don't forget the one we're all thinking and not saying - in traditional family roles, cooking dinner falls to me as a stay at home mom anyway.  On my self-scoring SAHM report card, I failed cooking badly.  That hurt.  And it was a wake-up call.

So, I did what any good SAHM would do: I grabbed a glass of wine and my laptop and I set to work.  My goal was to meal plan, hoping that would help me get on track to making good meals for the family, but I realized that I needed something more concrete than just a meal plan.  Since I don't really know how to cook, I needed something/someone I could count on to get some solid cooking skills under my belt, er, frilly apron.  

Enter Ree Drummond.

You may know her as The Pioneer Woman.  

If you haven't heard of the Pioneer Woman, you need to take a minute (or a few hours) to go check out her website.  Prepare to feel like a complete failure in every piece of your life.  Then prepare to want to hate her.  And finally, come to terms with the fact that she's such a cool chick you really wish she lived down the street from you so you could be BFFs ... even though you'd feel like a crappy wife/mother/cook/photographer/cattle herder whenever you hang out.  (But you know it'd still be totally worth it!)

Ree is a pretty popular in my neck of the woods.  We all drool over her accomplishments and her recipes, some friends make a few of them, use her photography tips, and two friends even stood in a very, very long line to meet Ree during her book tour.  After a few years of doing my own drooling, I'm jumping into the deep end of the pool with both feet, so to speak.

I'm going to learn how to cook, Pioneer Woman style.  Whew.  If you think that's not a big deal, I'd just like to redirect you back to paragraph 2: I don't cook.

Wanna come along?  I can't promise it'll taste good, but there will be plenty of chances to laugh at me and a few pictures along the way... pictures make everything better.

A Whole New Me: Part 1

Okay, it's been so long since I last posted that the web address for the blog didn't even come up in my address bar when I started typing.  When I tried to sign in, the working address (that's what I'm calling the thing that happens after you hit "enter" and everything in the address bar gets all crazy until you actually end up on the page for which you're looking) actually had the words 'passive' and 'blogger' right next to each other.  Seriously, it could have just said 'searching for www.you never post anything so we have to dig into the depths of the Internets (yes, Internets) to find your crappy page.com.'  But, I guess it wouldn't have been passive-aggressive if it did that.  Moving on...

I've commented to friends lately that I miss blogging but I find that I'm not putting the time into my schedule to actually do it.  I think I've figured out why.  I don't really have any direction with this blog ~ it's my 'fun blog,' not my family blog (don't take that the wrong way - I don't make the time to write/update that one, either!), so I never really wanted to make it specific to anything.  I wanted to be able to write whatever my mind was thinking about that day.  It turns out that either 1) I don't think very much, or 2) I just don't take time to write what I think.

Those two points said, I'm asking you to stick with me for a few more days as I develop the rest of this story for you.  Wait - what?  Here's the deal.  One of my awesome sisters-in-law is (among other things) an English teacher and a kick-ass blogger.  She updates her family blog regularly (read: usually daily), has a regular post that she links up to What I Wore Wednesday on her second blog, and is also doing Project365 again this year.   She posts a photo each day of the year to remember her day and since she's already completed it once, she is photographing things that make her 'happy' this year.  (I've tried Project365 four different years and I've never made it all the way to the end.)   ANYWAY... she's doing a neat post series about her journey to health and fitness right now and I decided that she had a great idea - so I stole it!  Nope, I'm not going to write about fitness.  All of that was a very long way of telling you just how awesome I think Emily is (and how very, very different we are!! HA!) and that this post is only PART 1 in my journey to a new place in my life.

Come back tomorrow for Part 2!