And so it begins...

So the other day I was looking for a recipe for beef stew.  I get sooo flipping tired of making the same recipes over and over and...well you get the point.  I go to my bakers rack and pull out a cookbook my Aunt Joan gave me last Christmas, "Secrets from the Southern Living Test Kitchens" and start thumbing through it.  In our family Joan is the "resindent executive chef."  I'm sure every family has one, Joan is ours and she is fabulous like that!  If you have a question about anything related to cooking and how to prepare things, she usually has the answer.  Now I've made one or two recipes from this book before, however I couldn't tell you what they were.  I started to discover how awesome this cookbook really is and how much I didn't already know about food.  Now I've been baking and cooking before I could even reach the kitchen counter.  My Grandmother, or better known as "Momzy" started teaching me family recipes at a very early age.  I believe Sweet Potato Pie was one of the very first things we made together.  My fondest memories are those in the kitchen with my mother, Momzy and Joan.  So in honor of the three most influential woman in my life, I am going to start my own test kitchen and work my way from A-Z of the this cookbook.  Hopefully by the end of this journey I may be able to teach them a thing or two.  Oh and as for the Beef Stew...oddly enough, there wasn't a recipe for that.  So I just used a good 'ol tried and true recipe I had, and of course, it was delicious!