The Do It The HardWay Cookbook; 200 recipes in 400 days

If you’re anything like me, you love eating tasty food. Sitting down to a nice dinner of grilled swordfish and sautéed veggies, perhaps a nice chicken chili with cornbread, maybe even some linguine with white clam sauce. Well not only do I love eating these savory delights, I love cooking them too. I also like being healthy, and I always strive to use the healthiest ingredients, preparing dishes that are not only tasty, but high in nutrition and low in bad fats and added salt and sugar. These have been some of the key elements to my “Do It the Hard Way” concept all along. Learning about nutrition, how to read labels, developing an understanding of what good ingredients are, and preparing healthy dishes all take an investment of time and energy, but an investment that is not only rewarding to my taste buds, one that enhances other aspects of life, that being health and well-being.

With this blog, I am now officially on a mission to create the “Do It the Hard Way” cookbook over the next year. 200 recipes in 400 days. Recently, me and Eric watched a great inspiring movie ‘Julie and Julia’”. If you haven’t seen this movie, the story is about an aspiring writer who set out to cook all of the recipes in Julia child’s ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ over the course of a year, blogging about her cooking adventures, and occasional debacles daily. My concept is similar in nature, except I will be creating all of these dishes myself, inventing some from scratch, and adapting many popular recipes into healthier “Do It the Hard Way” versions.

To hit my goal of 200 recipes for this book, that’s roughly 4 a week from now until my birthday on September 23 of 2011. Each recipe will require several steps to be deemed book ready. First comes the initial idea or concept, then the food is prepared, cooked, and photographed before the all-important taste test. At some point during this process I need to make sure I have written down exactly what I used for ingredients as well as how I prepared and cooked the meal. Then I need to sit down at the computer, enter all of this info (including the nutritional specs), and create a blog post for the recipe.

Assuming I can reach my goal of 200 recipes by my self-imposed deadline, I will then begin work on the printed book design which I hope to have available by January of 2012. It will be a lot of work to keep up with this pace, but I am determined to see it through. I am also very fortunate to have some assistance by way of the world’s best live in prep cook, my husband, Eric, who is also the chief photographer in this project.

The good news is that you don’t have to wait until 2012 to try these recipes. As I will be posting them online as I create them, I urge you to try the ones that interest you and leave comments. Tell me what you like and what you don’t like. I’m open to suggestions and encourage your participation to help improve these dishes as I go along. And if you have any ideas about a recipe you would like to see me create a healthy version for, by all means, please send them along.

So that’s it, 200 recipes in 400 days to yield the Do It the Hard Way cookbook.

Happy cooking!