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It was my birthday last week, and I had a fantastic weekend. To start with, on Friday night some of my amazing friends hosted a Prosecco Craft Birthday Party…which is right up my alley (post to come). By the time Saturday came along, I was ready for some quiet celebrating with my sweet husband. We spent the morning on the couch (with the fire going…it’s chilly in Charleston this year, y’all!) enjoying our new coffee table.  As we relaxed, we decided to make dinner at home and spend time together, which was perfect. Eariler in the day, I had received the  Vivian Howard cookbook, Deep Run Roots for my birthday from my in-laws, which I really wanted, but didn’t tell anyone about…what a lovely surprise! We began our obsession with her show, A Chef’s Life last year (#PBSrepresent)…if y’all haven’t been watching, I highly recommend it, it’s perfect for weekend binging! The in-laws watch it and love it too (it’s not just us) and thought I might like the book, which I certainly do. This book is HUGE (about 550 pages) and beautiful so it will live on the new coffee table in our family room, which is connected to the kitchen- the best of both worlds.  In addition to it being a great book visually, it contains so many interesting recipes, ones we’ve been eagerly awaiting from when we first heard about the cookbook on the show.

As we flipped through trying to choose a recipe for dinner (post coming), we started discussing our good friend Jessica at Jessie on The Rocks and how fun her blog is- she’s on a journey creating and drinking margaritas- who wouldn’t like that? Our conversation turned to inspiration as we decided to apply the same idea to our kitchen, thus 52 Weeks of Vivian was born. Each week, for a year, we’ll choose, cook, eat (yum), and write about a recipe from Chef Vivian Howard’s cookbook.  The best part about doing this is that we’ll be doing the whole thing together- planning, shopping, cooking, and writing. Not only am I excited about all of her delicious recipes, but I’m doubly jazzed over doing all of this with my favorite mister.

Our plan is to prepare the recipes exactly as they’re written, with one caveat…we’ll be substituting dairy as needed, since I can’t have lactose. For our first recipe, we cooked with ghee, rather than regular butter and it went really well. You might be wondering if we’ll skip all of the meat recipes, and we definitely will not. The current plan is to invite someone over to enjoy the meatier fare, although Vivian Howard is a proponent of meat as a condiment, so I’m hoping that other ingredients prove to the be the star of the show in most of the recipes.

Look for our first one on Valentine’s day, February 14th at aCrunchyPeach.com.  We’ll keep you updated on what goes on and we will post footage in our Insta story as we cook, so if you need some sneak peeks before we publish each week, that will be your spot to check (@aCrunchyPeach).

I can’t wait to get started on this new project and share it with y’all.