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!