Alright then. So I will post my pictures in backwards order, so the oldest, January 1st is last. Yes, I am particular that way ;) My husbands jokes that he would hate to have the everyday tug of war in my head that I have just to make a decision. Two choice is one choice too many, lol. Anyway, so that's what I will do. Yesterday, though, um... well, I had leftovers. I didn't want to take a picture of the same dinner I'd had the night before, so I took a picture of my favorite chair. It sits in the kitchen and I love having all the natural light coming in through the window. The photo doesn't seem to do it justice, though. It's just a real nice chair, with a terrific back. The seat is big enough that I can curl up in it to read a magazine, or the kids can clamor aboard and there is still some room.

Anyway moving on. On January 4th I made a terrific salad. It's actually my very favorite salad, and I wish I would try more, but I love this one so much, why look further? I usually use baby greens, but I was all out, so I did this one up with my husbands romaine lettuce. It's got beets (so yummy!!) pecans that I toasted with some maple syrup, avocado and goat cheese. So very good. I topped it all with a balsamic vinaigrette. One of my favorite things about this salad is that the dressing and the cheese mix together in such a way that towards the end of eating it, I have this creamy goodness coating each piece of veggie. The sweet and sour, the creamy and crunchy. It's all so good, my mouth is watering just thinking about it!


January 3rd, well, we shouldn't even talk about it... We had company and so I wasn't cooking just for me. I had made some fabulous looking chickens for some of the guests, but my husband came through and ate all the skin off of them before I had the chance to take their pictures. The poor things looked horrible, that I opted to do the mac and cheese instead. Instead, though, I had a horrible orange mass of cheese and noodle. It was an iffy recipe to start with. I found it on allrecipes.com and it had mixed reviews. Honestly, it would have come out perfect if the chickens didn't take an extra thirty minutes to cook. I checked on the mac and cheese and it was such a creamy goodness! It makes me sad to think that 30 minutes later it was a block of rubbery mass. Ew. So, Instead of taking that picture and being reminded that my dinner reflected more of a superball quality than something I would actually eat, I took a picture of some raw elbow noodles. It's as close as I could get to the main dish, without showing you the actual horror that it was.

Moving on to the second day of the year! I had some extra cream cheese from the holidays, and some wonton wrappers from later in the year when I made some easy ravioli. I decided to put the two together in a recipe I read on a blog. Now, the recipe called for 2-3 cloves of garlic, and really, I am not much of a garlic fan. So I put in one and called it good. The mixture also had some cheddar in it, and shrimp. I grated some yummy carrot in there too, and really, it would have been a very, very good dinner if the garlic hadn't been so strong. It took my breath away, really, how strong the garlic was! I had my husband eat a little bit of the filling, and even he commented on how strong it was- and he is a garlic lover! i had about eight of these before calling it quits, and my breath was so bad the rest of the night. I will probably try these again sometime, though, and omit the garlic altogether.

Here we are, at the first day of the year. Celebration time!! But with the way my family eats, well, we don't all have the same meal, and I did want to have some of that togetherness that sharing food brings. So bring on the bacon and pancakes!! My husband had the bacon, I had the pancakes, and the kids had both. All were happy. It was a good way to ring in the new year. It's not a tradition per se, but I am pretty sure we had pancakes and bacon the year before, too. It's the one thing we all can agree on, on some level at least, and the girls think it is extra special to have pancakes for dinner. At least it's a simple thing to cook up!!