Starting another project - I am going to cook as many recipes from Ellie Krieger's "The Food You Crave" cookbook as look appealing to Robert and I. Ellie is a nutritionist with a show on Food Network. So, if I can learn to cook these, we should have a repertoire of good for us, lower fat and calorie recipes.

There are several blogs on the web where people are cooking their way through a single cookbook. It started over a year ago when a woman named Julia, in a tiny apartment in New York, decided to cook every recipe in Julia Child's book "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". She blogged about it as she went along and completed each of 380+ recipes in 365 days. Amazing!

Here is our first try. Greek-Style Stuffed Peppers, page 188.

I couldn't find bulgar wheat at our store so we used brown rice. One of the nice things about this book and FoodNetwork.com is that you can see comments of other cooks who have made the recipes - their ratings, and their suggestions for adjusting the process.
This turned our really good. It was a little bit of a hassle to make,

but the good flavor was worth it.

Here is how ours would have looked if we had a food stylist.
Here is Evelyn my beautiful mother-in-law on her last visit to see us in San Diego. Why is she appearing in this post about cooking? Well, for a couple of reasons - one she is a great cook! Second, she is fun to cook with and easy to be with. Third, she doesn't criticize even when I have made something horrible tasting.

See below:

This is a picture from FoodNetwork.com of a recipe we slaved over during one

Thanksgiving season visit. It is a sweet potato gnocchi by Giada De-Laurentis. It was completely awful - could not be eaten. I can't remember what we actually ate for dinner that night - probably popcorn.

Why tell this story when I am beginning a new cooking adventure? Because this week I made my second in-edible meal and sure enough we ate popcorn. The recipe came from this little book:

We made a good meal out of it a couple of weeks ago. Here is the concept. You layer food into a Dutch oven and cook it at high heat and you have your meal in one pot, not just stew like because the foods are spooned out separately. The author has written the recipes for two people cooked in a 2 quart Dutch oven. You can double or triple for additional servings using larger Dutch ovens which is what we did when we cooked Thai Chicken which had bell peppers, bamboo shoots, string beans and bok choy. I had never tasted bok choy and I really liked it. Robert liked saying "bok choy" for some reason and went around the house repeating it and chuckling. We doubled the recipe but cooked it in a Dutch oven that was too big. I adjusted our oven to a manual temp gauge. But because the pot was too big there wasn't enough moisture and we had a little overdone bok choy that I was able to get out of the pot before serving.

So I ordered a little 2 quart Dutch oven on the internet and we tried another recipe. I didn't adjust the oven this time thinking that the overcooked bok choy may have been because I wasn't measuring the oven temp properly. Out of the oven it came and the chicken was still raw. We tried to cook the chicken in the microwave but it turned into a real

I'm not giving up on it until I try with the right size pot and right oven temp.