A Few Favorites...

I remember those first few meals I prepared for John as a new wife--and new cook.  They were, hmmm, how shall I put it?  Lackluster, I guess.  I just needed some practice, and over time, I got better at cooking, but not without some help!  I had a great foundation; my mom had written out all our family favorites, including where and who they came from.  But over the years, I have collected some resources that have greatly helped me.  Here are some of them.

The #1 website I've used for well over 10 years is Allrecipes.com.  I have found so many great recipes on this site.  It was one of the first cooking websites to give users the ability to rate the recipes.  Whenever I'm looking for a "tried and true" recipe, I look here first.  

For a wide variety of recipes, check out Food Network.  You can also rate those recipes, watch some portions of the cooking shows; there's a lot of information on this website.  

A website that I've used several times in the past used to be called Recipezaar.  Now it's called food.com.  Check it out here.  I really liked the fact that it had a large section devoted to freezer and once a month cooking with lots of valuable info.  

Speaking of once a month cooking, I love the website Once a Month Mom!  This website has really grown over the last year and they have monthly plans now for regular meals, diet meals, baby food, and even a podcast for every month.  Really cool site run by great people.  

Okay, how about cooking blogs?  I must say, these have really grown in popularity over the past few years.  Obviously!  Well, I have to say that my favorite cooking blog is Cooking During Stolen Moments.  Every recipe I've tried from Kate's blog is great.  If she ever wrote a cookbook, I'd buy it. 

Well, the queen of cooking blogs has got to be The Pioneer Woman.  Her blog has all sorts of things on it, pictures of her kids, family, friends, recipe tutorials, home and garden stuff, homeschooling stuff, all written in a fresh, unpretentious style with great photos.  Her cookbook is great, too.  What I really love about her is that although she has gained quite an amount of "fame" with her blog and cookbook, she still proudly uses Cool Whip, cake mixes, canned fruit, you know "normal" stuff.

A great blog for healthy recipes is Ginny's Skinny Recipes.  I haven't tried any of the recipes personally, but they all look really good.  I go there and look over the recipes and photos a lot.

Last one for now is not really a cooking blog but the woman who writes this blog organizes a "Menu Plan Monday" (remember when we talked about that yesterday?) that TONS of people link up to and share their menus every week.  The blog is I'm an Organizing Junkie and here is her Menu Plan Monday page.  You can find the links to everyone's menus every week.  She has a post about it.  Here is the post for this week.  So far, there's 463 menus posted and counting!

Different subject, BUT, we made the Pepperoni Pizza Puffs for lunch today.  This was a new recipe for us and everyone really liked them.  The four of us "scarfed" them down, as Emma would say!  They were a little hard to get out of the mini muffin pan, and it was a non stick pan that I sprayed with non stick spray, too.  But other than that it was a good, easy, quick recipe.  We'll add it to our pizza recipe rotation, since we have pizza in some form or another 2-3 times a week!

Well, that's it for today.  "Try Me" Thursday is coming up, with a review of those fish sticks!!