When the hubby gave me Magnolia Table as a Christmas gift in 2018, I flipped through it on Christmas morning reveling in all the pictures. As I began to pause on particularly scrumptious looking dishes to read the recipes I found myself saying, “this sounds really good” over and over again. They were not particularly fancy or exotic dishes (lots of comfort food and ingredients that were not scary) and so many of them were things I would love to cook that I decided to challenge myself to cook them all.
What followed was 4 months of learning new cheeses, embracing kosher salt and freshly ground pepper, and expanding my skills a bit. It kick-started a bit of kitchen organizing, resurrected some of my kitchen gadgets I had purchased in the past but rarely used, got me to clean off at least half of my island, and expanded my spice collection to the point I had to revamp it and create a second storage area for it (alphabetically arranged, of course).
I posted pictures and short recaps of the food and the process with an overall score for the recipe on my personal Facebook page. I am a “doer” so my Facebook timeline is mostly populated with pictures from my yard, garden, or kitchen with the occasional dog meme thrown in for humor. I am also a Project Manager, both in profession and in the core of my being, so after the last recipe was cooked, scored, and posted I summarized the whole thing in a write up and a series of graphs to illustrate my final conclusions.
I present here the summary and a blog post on each of the recipes with my take on it. Each person has their own tastes and preferences so keep that in mind if you disagree with me on my scores. Feel free to tell me what you think in the comments, just stay civil and be kind.
Results by chapter
Love the graphics! 😁
Who doesn’t love a pie graph on a baking blog?