Happy New Year Everybody. It’s officially the year of the dragon and the launch of a new Food Project at Casa Perez. For 2012 I wanted to mix things up a bit and I thought hard about what kind of food I would be excited about eating every week for a year (you know besides tacos). I thought of investigating my father’s culinary roots and cooking filipino food for a year, or going healthy and cooking through a vegan or other “healthy” cookbook for a year. There were so many possibilities but in the end no cookbook seemed right. I guess that a Rick Bayless cookbook is a hard act to follow! Instead I’m trying something new.

Every week this year for the rest of the year I’m going to be cooking up: asian noodles!

My love for noodles is probably unhealthy and unnatural. Whenever TV characters are eating chow mein takeout I feel irrationally jealous and sometimes I page thorugh the my cookbooks just to gaze longingly at the noodle recipes. Strangely these procliviites have never really translated into actually cooking noodles.

2012 is going to put an end to that foolishness. No more longingly watching the Big Bang Theory gang dig their takeout cartons. This year I am making pad thai, pancit and dan dan noodles with wild abandon. To get started I went through all my cookbooks and flagged every single noodle recipe. You can help me too! Do you have  a favorite noodle recipe I should try? Is there a blog post you saw somewhere that you are drooling over and I should be the guinea pig? Let me know! Like the Bayless recipe I commit to being truthful about the ups and downs and because I won’t be pulling recipes exclusivley from one source I’ll feel better about posting the actual recipes more often. I’m excited about starting another project and something about the Year of the Dragon feels right. Let’s go!