Lythrum & James?

You know, Elle has to be one of my best performing roses ever. On Tuesday evening I trimmed her up, gave her a good watering and treatment for black spot. There are blooms all over her now and they smell amazing. The Gnomeslayer loves to smell of them now too. I cut one for her and gave it to her and she carried it around for a while burying her face in it. For the last couple of weeks we have had amazingly good weather for the Deep South. Mild weather, no humidity...I even had to wear a jacket one morning it was so cool. Last night we had really heavy rains blow through, and it felt like a sauna out today. As I was walking through the yard I could feel the steam rising up from the ground. We've had some very dramatic skies too, and the clouds were lined up like soldiers on a battlefield today. Too bad I didn't have my camera with me. And my camera, bless it's heart, I've dropped it twice now on the concrete and it's still working. Good thing it seems to be a robust design!

So on to the title. I've been hearing a lot lately about the Julie & Julia movie. I've read her blog some and thought it was pretty interesting, but I really have zero interest in French cooking. It did give me an idea though. I have a pretty big collection of cookbooks, most of them American or Southern cooking. Most of them I have either cooked one or two recipes from, or none. So I thought it might be neat if I picked out one of them at a time and worked my way through the recipes and tried to cook them all. So I think I am going to start with Stews, Bogs & Burgoos by James Villas. James is my very favorite cookbook author. I love reading his stories about how he came across certain dishes. He's more of a foodie than I am, I'm not so much of a purist and I'm not going that far out of my way to get special ingredients. Most of my cooking is done on the weekends because I don't have time during the week. I have three day weekends, so I could theoretically get at least three done a week. I guess that is going to be my target to start with.

I do have some rules, because I doubt that I'll be making all of these recipes:

• I don't do organs.
• I don't do seafood.
• I don't do lamb.
• I don't do veal.
• I don't do mushrooms.
• I don't do olives.

So if there is a recipe that heavily features one of these things I'm probably not going to cook it. I guess we'll see how it works. :)