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...

Life Long Passion for Food Part 9: Puffed Pancakes

The other day I posted a picture of our Thanksgiving breakfast dish. I have made this dish on days I deemed special over the last 30 plus years. The Marlene Sorosky cookbook, Cookery for Entertaining,  is falling apart! I’ve also made her Frozen Lemon Cream served in hollowed out lemons. Marlene Sorosky had a cookware store and I had attended a class there with French chef, Jacques Pepin. What a delight he was. And during the class Danny Kaye dropped in and showed Jacques how to make these special Chinese Chicken Lollipops, made from the wing segments. read...

Life Long Passion for Food Part 8: Avocado Tasting

  Upon opening my box from Avocado Diva, I found two layers of avocados. You can see the box in the previous blog about avocados. Then I found a letter telling me what varieties were included and a description of each type. Also in the box was a little jewel called a finger lime, citrus caviar. There was also a card that describes heritage avocados. On the flip side were three ways to ripen avocados since they do not ripen on the tree. I had a wait about 3-4 days before I could eat any. My box included the following varieties: Reed and Lamb. She also included a couple of Walter Hole and a Gem avocado. read...

Being Sad and Feeling Sad: Is There a Difference?

Have you ever stopped to think about this? The difference between being sad and feeling sad? You may say there is no difference. But I believe you are wrong. What brought all this up? I see posts where people respond to something tragic with “I am sad” or “This makes me sad” and we accept that so easily. We don’t stop to think of the word “being”. Being means “the nature or essence of a person” according to Wikipedia. The free on-line dictionary says it’s “The state or quality of having existence”. read...

Life Long Passion for Food Part 8: Avocados

Taking a break from my food history and writing about avocados. Why you may ask? I got an amazing package in the mail from a woman, Brenda Cusick, who calls herself the Avocado Diva. And that she is. She can give you so much information on avocados. It’s amazing. I never knew there were so many varieties of avocados. My knowledge of avocados is pretty basic. I probably first had them in a Mexican restaurant in the form of guacamole. I’m familiar with Fuertes (not a favorite) and Hass (favorite).  When we bought our house many decades ago, we acquired an avocado tree. Until we moved here and had a tree, I didn’t know that avocados have to be picked and put in paper bags to ripen. We kept waiting for them to ripen on the tree! 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 5: Holiday Cooking

Holidays always meant lots of cooking in our families. I say families because my mom had two sisters nearby and we often did joint dinners but not always.  Sometimes the out of state siblings came in as well. And Italians can be so noisy! Christmas cookies were a must. Mom always made thumbprint cookies and sugar cookies and once again, I was begging her to teach me. I remember the first thing she let me do was put the thumbprint into the cookie where the jelly would be put. She made the thumbprint cookies with nuts. I would help with the Christmas cookies. One of my aunts made these Nut Crescent cookies and my other aunt or mom would make the ricotta cheese pie. read...