For a wedding gift I received a cookbook from a friend who was older and wiser than me.  The book is long gone, but I'll never forget the haunting inscription hand-written in the front cover: "Hopefully this book will help you answer that age-old question, "What's for Dinner"."

My 18th anniversary is in two days, so not counting nights we've eaten out, holidays, sick days, vacations, etc., I'm guessing I've had to answer that question, oh, about 3,744 times in my married life.  I've gone through every meal-planning, idea-gathering, organizational strategy known to man.  I currently own over 70 cookbooks, plus recipe binders, and I've done innumerable internet recipe searches.  But the question remains every day, "what's for dinner".

Don't get me wrong, I like to cook, I love fresh, local, organic and pastured food, and I am addicted to cookbook reading for fun.  I'm committed to cooking real food for my family, and two of us are gluten intolerant, so scratch cooking at home is a necessity as well as a passion.  But somehow when late afternoon rolls around and I'm tired, or invested in a project I'm working on, the thought of starting a meal, eating it, and then spending all night cleaning it up really doesn't sound all that appealing.  And right now, it's so hot outside I don't want to use the oven, or stand over the grill or stovetop either. 

So.  I've launched a new project:  in the interest of REALLY learning how to best utilize a slow cooker (which doesn't heat up the house, or the cook!) I've bought two new slow cooker cookbooks, picked out 52 recipes that fit our dietary needs, and I'm cooking my way through them and writing reviews.  I hope this will be a blessing to other household managers who have the same question to answer every afternoon.