#17 Watch "The Godfather"

I know it's hard to believe that I have lived almost 30 years without seeing this movie.  It's like Star Wars or Ferris Bueller's Day Off, most everyone has seen it (not surprising though, I haven't seen those either).  Luckily, my friend Kayla hadn't seen The Godfather either so we decided to make a movie night of it.  We ordered pizza and got comfy...I didn't realize the movie was 3 hours long!  Another reason I wanted to see this one was because two of my favorite movies reference it. You've Got Mail and Serendipity have Godfather references and I thought it would be even funnier if I knew what they were talking about.

I'm sure most everyone knows what this movie is about so I'll spare the synopsis.  Overall, I thought it was a good movie...it kept me guessing and surprised me a few times.  I probably won't ever watch it again but I'm glad I finally saw it.

#22 Make a new recipe a month - February

I am not a cook.  I don't mind cooking but I don't really enjoy it and I don't do it very often.  My signature dishes are macaroni and cheese with hot dogs, Ramen noodles, and spam and rice.  It takes planning and time to make meals and I don't always have a lot of time, well I didn't when I was in school.  So now that I'm done I've made it my goal to cook more.  At this point, most anything I cook will be new to me, since my recipe history isn't very long.  A new recipe a month isn't very ambitious, so maybe I should up that to a new one every 2 weeks (I don't want to be overwhelmed!).

Thankfully, I'm married to someone who is a wonderful cook.  He's good at it and likes to do it.  Sometimes though, he cooks at home like he's cooking at the firehouse...greasy and big portions.  I'm hoping the recipes I  contribute will balance out what we eat and add some variety.

My husband is a HUGE deer hunter and a lot of our meat comes from the deer he's killed.  We have 30 lbs of ground deer meat in our deep freezer so I wanted to find a recipe that could use some of it.  For the most part, I interchange ground beef and deer so I thought of making shepherd's pie and substituting with deer.  I wanted to make it in the crockpot so that I could start it in the morning and not have to worry about it again.  There are lots of recipes online but I found mine in the Crock Pot Slow Cooker Bible.  It consisted of 2 lbs of deer meet, frozen mixed veggies, diced tomatoes, oregano, quick cooking tapioca, black pepper, salt, and mashed potatoes.  Super easy and it turned out delicious.  Below is a picture of everything before I added the mashed potatoes.  I meant to take a picture after but we started eating right away and then Justin cleaned everything up before I got a chance to take an "after" picture (but I'm not complaining!).

Bottom line, I'm sure Justin appreciated me cooking for a change and it turned out delicious.  I need to start looking for my next recipe!