One of my favorite things to do on vacation is to haunt the nearest Barnes & Noble where I can sit for hours, sipping my decaf coffee (okay… it’s mostly just milk) and poring over a good cookbook. This past weekend during my morning visit to the bookstore coffee bar in Atlanta, I happened upon Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible, and after a quick perusal, I knew that I couldn’t leave the store without it. It’s an older cookbook from 2011, but “delicious” has no expiration date, right?

Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible is a huge, 480-page book that’s packed with decadent-sounding recipes like Smothered Steak and Onions, Baked Chicken and Pineapple Casserole, Apple Fritters, and a whole host of other recipes that, judging by the frequency of the mention of butter and cream, are definitely not going to be any good for my Weight Watchers diet. It’s truly fabulous … or whatever the Paula Deen Southern equivalent of that is.

The book only falls short in one little area. The photographs. The book is hundreds of pages long, but only a few pages are devoted to showing the finished product, and the “Picture-Is-Worth-1000-Words” thing is definitely true in the world of cookbooks. At least for me it is.

But I love the book so much that I’ve decided to correct the problem for future at-home aspiring Paula Deens by making and photographing every single recipe in the book. That’s right. Every single one. In addition, I’ll be rating each recipe so that you know which ones to spend the calories on and which ones to skip right over.

And the fun starts today as my test kitchen whips up the very first recipe in the book: Pecan and Cream Cheese-Stuffed Dates.

To be perfectly honest, my experience with dates is limited to … this recipe, but I’ve got a lot of life experience with bacon and cream cheese, so I’m jumping right into the deep end of the pool.

And… ta-da!

Okay. It turns out that dates are not that photogenic, but you get the idea.

I thought this was going to be a really easy recipe. I mean, there are only five ingredients: cream cheese, bacon, pecans, dates, and pepper. Easy-peasy, right?

In fact, it turns out that dates are very confusing, so whipping up this recipe turned out not to be very easy-peasy at all.

First, I had a little trouble finding dates at the grocery store. I finally found them at Ingles on a produce endcap. They had them in a bulk bin. That was actually great because I was able to purchase only the dates needed for the recipe.

Second problem: The cookbook says to “stuff each date with some of the cream cheese mixture.” The book says literally nothing about getting rid of the pit in the center of the date. I ran into my first pit by accident while I was stuffing my third date. Luckily, I was able to go back and remove the pits from the first two before it was too late.

Final Verdict: Delicious, y’all! Just the right blend of sweet and savory.

Extra Tips: If I made this again, I would use longer pieces of bacon for the wrappers. The book calls for 1/3 piece of bacon per date. That’s definitely too short.

For the complete recipe, you can purchase Paula Deen’s Southern Cooking Bible on Amazon.