My first blog of the day! or year! or even life!

The BIG plan had been to create a blog to share about my hiking adventures with a friend of mine who was battling cancer this year. I had grand aspirations about it and so I created a blog (which I was unable to find) and never did anything with it. I know... sad day and I am such a horrible friend! My almost valid excuse for never blogging was due to the fact that I had begun the blog to share hiking adventures with my friend Ellen, since she would not be able to hike this year. Unfortunately, I spent two months of the not so long summer on crutches and never actually went hiking. In September, my friend passed away, thankfully no longer suffering, and she has gone on to be with her Maker. She was an amazing woman and has made a difference in the lives of those around her.  She is greatly missed.

The weirdest thing happened the other day.  Ellen is my friend on facebook. Actually, I think she will always be my friend on facebook since there is no one to delete her account anymore. So FB has created this new thing to help you stay connected with people. It will tell you that you haven't emailed so and so in a while and and it tells you to send them a message. So I got one of these from FB about Ellen. :) It made me smile to know that she will not be forgotten.

Now, since she had been the main reason for blogging and she is no longer reading blogs, i have had to re-evaluate. I needed to figure out what I should blog about. What aspect of my life would people even care to read about? Should I blog about my adventures around the world or hiking or cooking or feelings on things or my silly little conspiracy theories?

I was recently introduced to thepioneerwoman.com. I am so excited about this blog and all these ideas came crashing in on me. Not only is she one of my new hero's, but she's really fun to read. Why not blog about it all? And just be me... which most often is random and sporadic and passionate and adventurous and again, quite random. I am really excited to share my most favorite recipes! I have some new recipes that I am SOO excited about, and over Christmas I am gonna snag my Memere's recipes (translation: my grandmother's recipes). I am super excited to have them documented and easily accessible for me and whoever else happens upon them.

So when I decide to cook something, such as lasagna or banana bread or breakfast casserole, if I don't absolutely LOVE the recipe, then I try another and another and sometimes even another.  Now if I can't find one that I really like within a certain amount of time, I might quit cooking that dish all together. Thats what I did with lasagna. Last year, I think I made 10 lasagnas. They were good, but they weren't great. At that time, I didn't own a big enough pot to boil the noodles, so I was using the ones you don't bake. Since I couldn't find a recipe that I LOVED, i blamed it on the noodles and haven't made lasagna in over a year. Someday I promise I'll try again. I have recently just done the same thing with homemade mac and cheese, and I have to say that Ree Drummund from thepioneerwoman.com has the perfect recipe! Its GOOOOOD! But now here's my problem. What if even though the recipe from Ree is great, but not the best? What if I stop looking for recipes and am missing out on some fabulous mac and cheese recipe?

Anyways... thats the blog for today. Recipes to follow.