To try to keep on track for the coming year I have been busy listing my goals.  Homemaking goals (why don’t I adore cleaning??), budgetary goals (how can I shave 10% off everything I buy??), personal goals (don’t want to scare you with that one), and of course cooking goals and blogging goals.  So I have a comprehensive list of things that I would like to blog about in the coming year, all organized by date, so I can stay on track and be ahead of the game instead of flying by the seat of my pants so to speak.  It will take alot of work this winter, since I don’t have a studio and lighting, I have to shoot things during the day or the photos look just dreadful and well, lets just say that my photography skills are on the list for improvement as well.

So some of the things that you can expect to see in the coming year are…

• Daring Challenges - completed on time (I hope), this has been very frusterating for me because I am inclined to procrastinate and wait to the last minute.  For dinner tonight?  Tomorrows DC post.  This is bi-mothly (until they toss me out for late participation/no participation).
• Seasonal ingredient recipes - I really want to refocus this year on more local, seasonal, organic meals that are made from scratch.  Incorporating health benefits and growing tips, trips to my garden (yet to be completed) and the farmers market.  So for example, this week I am going to focus on Lemons, I have about 6 recipes that I want to feature this month that focus on lemons.  My own lemon trees are not producing this year but I have a friend on 10 acres who has lemons, so a trip to his place for a harvest and some health benefits to accompany.  I am thinking this might be a bi-monthly feature on the blog, it will be educational and it will help me to understand the seasons and create a library of recipes for those seasonal items .
• Baby updates - weekly
• Photography - I want to start learning more about my new camera and experimenting more.  I was thinking it would be fun to choose a photograph from a book or magazine and prepare the recipe, then try to duplicate the food styling and photograph the results to post alongside the original photo.  I think it will be a great learning experience and fun as well.  Perhaps once a month?
• Garden - I really want to put in a big garden, but with my belly getting larger and my time before the baby getting smaller, I just don’t see that happening on the scale that I want it to be.  So this season I have a few things planted in the little landscape planters against the house, under the kitchen window and I guess I will make the best of that for now.  I could ask Panfilo (our neighbor and gardner) to put it all in for me (again) but then I feel like it is not really mine.
• Chickens - We lost all of our hens this past summer, between the heat (126F) and Madigascar (our 3 yo Akita) they have all perished.  I put in a mister system and shade cloth to keep them cool but we lost 3 of our Red Island layers.  They free ranged during the day and Madi was fine with that, but when we got new little Bantam Cochins and they began to free range Madi didn’t identify them as ours (I guess) so she killed them.  We have one little lonely rooster left.  So I was hoping to buy a couple of young Cochin hens (for near immediate eggs) and then some chicks to raise up.  I also want to put in a new hen house and runs for our future chickens.
• Cookbooks and Magazines - I have started to go through all my cookbooks and magazines and organize what it is that I want to cook from them, this is going pretty well.  I am organizing the recipes on a spreadsheet by season.  This reminded me that somewhere I have a list of things that I want to make right away, so I need to find that and then I will post it too.
• On my blog, I need to figure out how to do an update.  This is going to be a pain in the …  because I have to move all the photos that I have posted over to my Flickr account and then re0insert them into my blog, then back everything up, then update.  It’s a weekend, maybe more project that I keep putting off.  I am also thinking of changing the look of the blog, mostly because I can not get this “theme” to accept photos in any larger format or center them.  So I was looking at a more “magazine style theme” that would give me more flexibility.  I also want to reorganize how things are catagorized on my blog and install a recipe finder. 

I think that after blogging for nearly a year, I really have learned alot about what I like about blogging and what I don’t like.  I know more of what I want my blog to be and what I want it to look like and these few changes above will help me to create something that I will be proud of (more proud of).

~Blondie