Background of Frying Pickle

I was watching TV a few weeks ago and saw the preview for the movie Julie & Julia, a story about a girl named Julie cooking her way through a Julia Childs cookbook. I was inspired by this and love trying new things, so I thought "What better way to utilize my cookbooks than to start on p.1 and cook my way through to the end". I ran the idea by my husband and told him that we would have to eat every recipe no matter what it was and if we didn't like it Pizza Hut was a call away. So we decided, since some recipes can be pretty expensive, to do 1 recipe a paycheck. We also decided to cook them on Sunday evening and invite new people over each time to try the different recipes (of course we would tell them of our back-up plan should they not like it). Now the next step was to pick a book. I grabbed 3 of my favorite cookbooks and read the first recipe out of each book and had my husband choose which one I would be doing, based on that. He chose "Food Network Favorites", which is a book with most of the BIG Food Network stars in it (Alton Brown, Paula Dean, Bobby Flay, Rachael Ray, Giada De Laurentiis, Mario Batali, Wolfgang Puck, etc...). So now the adventure begins...