My Project

Little wants so badly to be big like her sisters and sit in a chair to eat

Big gave a "Hostess" presentation at school last week with her ideas for planning a Camping party 

Middle loves to help me with any kind of cleaning or cooking

Those are some of the things the kids have been up too lately.  While I was on spring break, I finished a big project that I've been working on for the last couple months:  creating an index of the recipes on this blog.  The labels you seen on the right have been helpful, but now and then I'm looking for a specific recipe and it takes me awhile to find it (even though I'm the one who writes here and knows what lurks behind all these posts with non-recipe titles).  Most of the food blogs that I enjoy reading have an easily navigable index or recipe list of some sort and this has been a goal of mine for a long time.

After 5 years and almost 500 posts, I realized that what I've really been doing is creating an online recipe book & food journal for myself.  If you read my blog (Hi mom!  Hi Judy!) I appreciate you so much and if you'd like to pass along a link to this index to other cooks you know, that would be pretty awesome.

What's For Meat Recipe Index

Rereading all 476 posts made me sentimental for how fast my kids have grown up, made me appreciate the kitchen I have today and the things I've learned along the way, and inspired me to revisit some great recipes I'd forgotten about.

Here are just a few of my other random observations about What's for Meat:

1.  I've made a lot of great stuff over the years!  I pointed out this fact to my husband (along with the reminder of how lucky he is to be eating it all).

2.  It can be hard to decide which category some recipes belong under.  I didn't spend too much time agonizing, but sometimes there is a salad recipe that is more of a main dish or a side dish that is really more of a salad (or the other way around).

3.  The labels are useful when you're looking for something with a particular ingredient (zucchini, lemon, etc) or some category like crock pot or vegetarian.  The only special distinction I make in the index is to mark gluten-free recipes.

4.  And about that . . . some recipes may call for flour tortillas but corn can be substituted and the rest of the ingredients are gluten free - I marked those gluten free.  However, if a not-so-obvious substitution (like gluten free soy sauce) can make a recipe gluten free, I did not mark it as gluten free.     The categories that had the most gluten free recipes are ice cream, soup, and salads.

5.  I have a thing for rosemary (and a plant in my backyard).  And chocolate chips.  And brownies.  And I cook way more chicken than any other main dish.

There have been moments over the years when I was sure it was the end of this blog.  I wasn't very inspired, I don't have anything that unique to say here on the good ol' internet, I had three kids . . . but, it's a fun little hobby for me and for now, I'm going to keep plugging along.

Thanks for supporting me!