Homemade Tomato Basil Soup

It’s summertime and tomatoes are coming on fast and furious.  We love having a vegetable garden and we love to cook too. Our tomatoes aren’t quite ready so when a friend offered some of hers because she had too many and I grabbed them up. I shared some with others but one person never came to get hers so we decided to make tomato soup. We make our own tomato puree every year. I always make spaghetti sauce from our tomatoes. Spoiled? Most definitely. We took the tomatoes we had, washed and quartered them.  Tomatoes were put on the stove to get them soft. Next they were put through a hand press to remove seeds and any tough skins. read...

Fusion Chicken with Coconut Milk

It has been several months since I blogged and I’m rather glad so many want this recipe that it got me back into doing a blog. Now I have a couple more lined up. One I actually wrote in April! I named this Fusion Chicken because it’s got Chinese, Thai, and Indian seasonings. Please let me know if you have a better name. Leave it in the comments for  me. I’ve been making this chicken for my husband and I for the last few months. It’s a recipe that started with a modified Jaime Oliver recipe of Chicken in Milk that used coconut milk. That appealed to me more. I tried that one but Ron (hubby) didn’t like the cinnamon in it. It wasn’t thrilling me but I liked it. read...

You Are Enough Just As You Are!

Everyone needs to stop right now disapproving of the way they look, especially the young people of today. No, you don’t need to look like the models or the photos in the magazines or like the movie stars. Truth? Most of the movie stars don’t look like their own movie star image without the hair, the makeup or the clothes. Maybe a couple do. Just like there are a few common people who look pretty spectacular whether they wear makeup or not. There was a video on the internet that shows how they make the models look better than they are. The photos we see don’t represent real people at times. read...

Life Long Passion for Food Part 7: Thanksgiving Stories Continued

I had written about something that went wrong in my last post. Now the getting away part. After I had graduated college, I had moved to California. I got to visit here with my cousin at the age of 19 all summer and fell in love. I went back to finish school with the firm intent to move to California upon graduating.  Luckily for me, I had two job offers. Some 17 or 18 years later I was married. My cousin had married into a large family whom I had lived with a few months while apartment hunting a few years earlier. I had wanted my cousin to come for Thanksgiving but with her came all the in-laws, too. read...

Life Long Passion for Food Part 7: Thanksgiving Stories

I had written about Thanksgiving but I couldn’t fit in a few stories. You know, the ones that went wrong or the ones that got away! First up is Went Wrong. I was maybe 12 or so and Mom had gone to the store. She couldn’t find white raisins, also known as Golden raisins. This was very upsetting to her. Yet she couldn’t make the stuffing without raisins so she grabbed a box of raisins (so she thought!). She proceeded to make her stuffing , stuffed the capon and then did  all the other dishes. read...

Life Long Passion for Food Part 6: Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was always celebrated, sometimes together with the aunts and their families, sometimes the uncles from out of state and their families would join us. Mostly it was just the sisters and sometimes we had Thanksgiving for just the three of us. My mom was a very good cook. At our family Thanksgivings, we rarely had turkey. To this day, I’m not a huge fan of turkey, well, until recently, when I discovered Diestel Turkeys. But that’s another blog. What we had for almost every Thanksgiving and sometimes Christmas as well was fresh capon. read...

Life Long Passion for Food Part 2

In my previous post, I talked about getting started cooking. In this one, I’ll continue on with my lessons from mom. My mom was one of the cooks in the family. Her sister, Aunt Louise, was not.  Aunt Louise cooked but she did it out of necessity. Mom enjoyed cooking and loved to feed people who came over. We always had chops, cubed steaks, and ground meat. My aunt had a drapery shop. Between the decorators, workmen and sometimes clients, they would often get some venison too. I grew up eating lamb, pork, and beef. We ate liver and onions which I still love but rarely eat anymore (more on this later). read...

A Life Long Passion for Great Food

I always tell people I came out of the shute as a foodie. I have always loved food, good food. At the age of 10, I began begging my mom to teach me to cook. She finally gave in and by 12 I was making dinners for my mom, sister and I. Maybe it was a survival tactic, I don’t know. I suspect it may have been.  I firmly believe that food has a big impact on your health, too. My mother, who was Italian, did not measure things. When she taught me how to make her fantastic salad dressing, I remember her response when I asked how much oil (always olive oil) and vinegar (always red wine vinegar) do you put on the salad. She said “Your eyes and your hands will know”. Yes, that’s verbatim. read...

Day 4: Feeding Your Joy

What was I thinking getting into a month long blog challenge? Yes, that means 31 days. I know I could stop or I could keep going and do what I can. I can make the effort to write every day. Maybe I’ll do 31 blogs and maybe I won’t. One decision I made was to not beat myself up over this. I will do what I can. I have never joined a month long blog challenge. I have joined a month long writing challenge but it wasn’t anything you had to share. Thank heavens because some of it was raw, too raw to share. Now I see them as just stories, past stories that can be looked it and let go. When you focus on the past and past hurts, you just keep feeding the same circuits in your brain and relive the hurt, the pain and soon you create new situations to keep that same pain alive. read...