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Friday, January 1, 2010

Happy New Year and Twelve in Ten Challenge

Happy 2010! I can't believe another year has passed. 2009 flew by and it was an interesting year, to say the least. Highlights include travels to Mexico, London, Dublin, Seattle, and Copenhagen. Ryan and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary, have begun to really put roots down around our home and church, and are enjoying the ups and downs of establishing our family (only two members now and for a while!!). I discovered my love for cooking and baking and began this blog, which continues to grow as a fun hobby for me.

2010 will, I predict, be a year of more changes. Time will tell what those changes will be, but I can assure you that there will be some exciting changes on this blog, thanks to some exciting Christmas presents! Among them include lots of fun kitchen tools, including a pizza peel, an immersion blender, and other odds and ends. Even more exciting? A great friend bought me my own domain, so I am beginning the work of transferring this blog. This will be a bit of a slow process, so for the meantime continue to read THIS blog and I'll update you all when the time comes! Finally, the most exciting gift of all, was a much needed and much desired DSLR camera--a canon rebel to be exact. Ryan surprised me big-time with this awesome gift and I'm having a blast learning how to take better food pictures!

Along with all of these changes, Ryan and I have established a challenge of sorts for 2010. We're calling it 'Twelve in Ten' (unless anyone can think of a better name) and I'll be blogging about it on the way. We haven't worked out all of the specifics yet, that'll happen as time goes on. However, we've established a basic guideline that we intend to follow for the next year. How does it work? We will have a monthly food goal--6 months we will be trying out a St. Louis restaurant that is new to us and 6 months we will cook or bake something that we never have before. In essence, we're aiming to expand our food horizons!

We've decided on 6 restaurants, or types of restaurant, and 6 food categories, but we haven't completely hashed out the details of each month, or even which month we'll do what. Instead, we'll play it by ear each month, depending on our schedule and what we're anxious to do. I'm going to post our draft list below, and each month you can expect me to blog about one of these. My intentions of writing it all now are so that all of you can keep us accountable!

Without further ado, our current 'Twelve in Ten' list, in no particular order:

'New to Us' Restaurants to Try:
Mosaic (Replaced by Local Harvest, because I realized I've been to Mosaic twice...oops!)
The Fountain on Locust (for ice cream!!)

'New to Us' Kitchen Adventures:

Whew, and there you have our list. A little daunting, but also exciting!

Thanks for reading this long post--I'll be back tomorrow with an actual recipe!