I think in the entire history of television, I Love Lucy is by far my most favorite show. I grew up watching the reruns and I remember begging my Grandpa to relinquish control of the television when it was on (apparently he didn’t care for it and always told me no. *pout*). We live only an hour and a half away from Lucille Ball’s birthplace and the home to the “Lucy Museum”, aka Lucille Ball Desi Arnaz Museum and I have been more times than I count. I don’t even think it changes much and yet I feel like I always see something new when we go.

Anyway, more about the museum later…

I don’t know where I came across this cookbook but I knew I had to have it – even if I didn’t like any of the recipes (spoiler: I love so many of them). When it arrived, Michael and I went through page-by-page and marked the recipes that we would like to make. The real neat thing about this cookbook is that each recipe is tied to a specific episode in the show and it has pictures and captions about it. And I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t mention the photography. The food styling and photos look like they came out of a cookbook from that era. It truly looks authentic to the time period of the show.

I have to admit that so far we have only tried one of the recipes from this book since I haven’t had it for very long but I plan on cooking from it often. The Cuban Mojo Chicken was the first thing I made. I did modify it slightly since we don’t need to eat an entire chicken, so I marinaded some chicken breasts instead. It ended up marinating for about 24 hours due to a change in dinner plans but let me tell you, it tasted amazing! The garlic and lime juice really gave the chicken wonderful flavor! This will definitely be something that I make again.

On a fun note, I have the boxed set of all the episodes of I Love Lucy, so whenever I make a recipe from the cookbook, we will also watch the episode that goes with it.

So back to the “Lucy Museum”. Normally, they don’t allow you to take pictures inside but on a visit a couple years ago they said it was ok. So of course, all I had was my phone and not my big camera (figures!) but it was better than nothing. I took lots of photos of course but I thought I would share these ones for now.

They have replicas of the show sets (and in color but I turned them B&W to make them more real for the show). It truly is just like you’re standing there in the studio. Truly amazing! It never gets old when we’re there.

I could just keep going on and on about my love of Lucille Ball and I Love Lucy. If you’d like for me to post more about the museum and the other fun Lucille Ball things that I have done/seen, let me know!

XOXO, Jules