Watch out Food Network....here we come!

Okay, so Mande & I were having a email conversation earlier this week. It went like this:

Mande: From Bleaders...read below.

Lmao!!!!!



Tell her not to forget me when she becomes famous!!!!


I thought it was funny too. I like the way Nikki writes.

Me too……..has she ever tried sending articles to magazines???

Nikki: Oh, sweet Jesus!

Mande: What’s wrong with that?

Nikki: Nothing…just trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I have more fun typing than wiping a$$ all day at the hospital, but I enjoy it all the same. What to do, what to do? Find me a free lance writing job to get my foot in the door…lol

Mande: Hey – you know, someone at Food Network could read the blog & we could get our own show on Food Network!

Nikki: I like that idea lots better! We could call the show “It’s All Butter” a cooking/talk show. Paula would be our first guest and we’d have an obstacle course like on Double Dare (1986) and make her jump into a vat of butter! LOL Or pick a butter booger nose for shrimp or something. LOL Marc Summers could emcee, he already is on Food Network.

Mande: LOL I think she would be a hoot at that! Too funny! We’d have to have a shrine off to the side for JC (Julia Child) & every time we’d do something that came from her, we’d have to bow towards the shrine.

I think we’d have to have Martha on just so we could mock her. She’d probably get pissed. The she & Jules would have to fight with butter sabers…lol

Nikki: Butter Sabers….that’s the best! Food Network, here we come!
How about a shrine of Child made out of butter? BTW-Google butter sculptures...it's so gross with all that butter.

So Paula's been invited...

Per the request of one of my sister's co-workers, it is only fitting that Paula Deen be included in our adventure. I believe that she cooks with 3 times the amount of butter that Child used in her dishes. I believe that you'd all agree with me. Just look at the picture above. So, any ideas of which Deen cookbook we're going to take hostage? BTW-It's all butter!

Let's throw in some Jailbait too......

Now, where would the fun be if we just cooked out of Child’s MtAoFC? Not very much fun and the fact that Powell and countless others have done it already. So, the new adventure is that The Strickland girls will Master the Art of French Cooking with a Twist of Martha. Yep, I received another wonderful Christmas present from my best friend, Jen. She knows how much I LOVE to cook. According to her, she spent an entire hour looking through rows and rows of cookbooks at a bookstore, searching for the perfect one (that I didn’t have). Jen has given me Rachel Ray cookbooks in the past, so this year, she stepped it up a notch. (She knows that I like my food to look Purdy. ~that’s Southern slang for pretty.)



So, I unwrap The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook and thought to myself. Martha is a mold of Julia Child’s perfection; they could come together for a collaboration of recipes and wonderful food. Martha has intrigued me since her time she spent incarcerated. There was a 20/20 special on long ago and it showed the in’s and out’s of the big house and how to make a Frito pie in your cell. See, Martha could make a 5 course meal out of vending machine snacks by the time her sentence was up, because the other inmates taught her the basics.


Now, my sisters and I have enough culinary experience together to possibly get straight A’s through Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. I cook and do some baking, Mande bakes and she does some cooking and Julie can mix drinks and make any appetizer. We are the perfect culinary team to attempt this adventure. We know the basics. However, we all have a certain limit of how far we’ll go. I, myself, do NOT drink milk. Mande does NOT eat any type of poultry, except eggs. Julie freaks out over veins in her chicken and other abnormalities with her food.


So, we will be picking out recipes from Child’s MtAoFC, Martha Stewart’s Living Cookbook (more than 1,200 recipes) and to help us out a World Encyclopedia of COOKING INGREDIENTS. Let’s take this one notch higher; we’re even throwing in some of our favorite recipes (modified with tips & hints from Julia & Martha).


Duck a l'orange could turn into Chicken a l’orange and I’ve even thought about how to jazz up our Mamaw’s Orange Slice Cake glaze-thanks to Child and her tips on extracting flavor from orange peel. We’re possibly going to pass up Stewart’s Cucumber Coconut Soup (pg 117), but are trying Child’s Baked Cucumbers (pg 499). The Strickland sister’s have no timeline-this could possibly go on forever, between the two cookbooks alone; we have 1,700+ recipes (if we made them all) and that’s not counting our own personal recipes. But, you will have page numbers to the recipes we try and tweak and if it’s our own recipe, we’ll post it for you to try. Just maybe, we’ll even give you an estimated price tag on the meals we fix. We’re in a recession and going to be frugal. Stewart and Child had some money and we haven’t won the lottery yet, so it’s going to be real interesting people. January 2010, we’ll be getting into our cooking adventure. We’ll be working around JO volleyball, soccer, working on weekends and anything else life is throwing at us that moment. It’s going to be crazy good! And it’s all butter!

Nobody here but us servantless American cooks...

And so it begins...2010-now know as "The Year the Strickland Sisters Mastered the Art of Screwing Up French Cooking". I have invited my two sisters, Mande & Julie to join me (Nikki) on a quest, NO..an adventure to expand our dull American palates, while blogging. We have done our research, read Julie & Julia, watched the movie, read Powell's blog (pieces of it), obtained a copy of MtAoFC and our sister Julie can do a hell of an impersonation of Julia Child. Are you ready? Yeah, I think so!