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Due to my lasagna disaster last weekend and my quest for a recipe book/binder in which to keep my recipes grouped together, I have decided that I need a cooking-type label for my blog. Welcome 'Snarky Kitchen.' (By the way, I like the single quotation mark better than the double, even if I'm not using it correctly!)

I used to cook a lot when I lived with my parents because mom is a nurse and used to work 3rd shift at a hospital on the surgical recovery floor. She had left for work by the time we got home from school and wouldn't arrive home until after we'd gone to bed. I never appreciated how well-stocked mom's kitchen was until I moved out and had to buy my own kitchen supplies. My cooking and kitchen experimentation kind of went to the wayside for several years because I never seemed to have the right stuff.

M. gets 'burnt out' on foods we have several times, at least the pre-cooked freezer to oven boxes and fast food dinners. Perhaps my cooking will survive the M. burn out? We'll have to wait and see. Because of M.'s burn out on many of the dinners we were having and because I had discovered on of my now favorite websites - Pioneer Woman Cooks - I decided to start using my kitchen (since we built a house a couple years ago I have a pretty nice kitchen) and cooking again. One major downfall to this is that we actually have to do grocery shopping on a fairly regular basis, but because I love to be praised and hear how wonderful I am, the reactions from M. when I make a good meal are a good trade-off. And M. does come grocery shopping with me, so there's that too. If you've been a fan of my blog long enough you know I get the social anxiety and do not like to go shopping by myself.

So this weekend I made some very yummy chicken salad (but I had made that before and knew M. enjoys it) and I made a new experimental dinner last night - beefy potato skillet. M. seemed to like that okay too. I will post my chicken salad recipe some other time since I am not home and do not have access to it at the moment. For my beefy potato skillet I used PW's basic breakfast potatoes (minus any onions or garlic since M. and I don't really like those, also no bacon grease) and added some ground beef. It was nice and easy. Plus, I've always liked those side potatoes places like Denny's or IHOP use and these were kind of like that.

I decided on Sunday that even though I had not found a beautiful fillable recipe book yet I was going to start typing up my favorite recipes on 4x6 cards. This must have led to some good luck in the book/binder quest because I also had a break through in my quest for a book to keep all my recipes. And of course I found it on Amazon.com! It's not really an Amazon product, it's through a company called Organize.com. I briefly perused their website this weekend and that is not a website I should be going to! I love organizational products and could spend thousands and thousands of $$ there. Plus they tried to entice my with all these $5 and $10 off deals, but of course if you read the fine print you needed to spend $50 to get the $5 off... M., just so you know, I only purchased the recipe binder, and I did it through Amazon. M. knows about my closeted shopping addiction - but only for online shopping. We might be rich if not for the development of online shopping since I hate to go shopping in actual real life stores.

Oh, and low and behold, Pioneer Woman is giving away a Kitchen Aid standing mixer and what have I been thinking I needed as an addition to my kitchen? Yes, yes, yes - a standing mixer! So wish me luck. PW uses random.org to chose her winners, so I have as good a chance as anyone...