Category: Uncategorized
Fun.
Turning the tables.
I’m convinced I’m the least read, most well known blog out there. Everyone knows I blog, but no one I know seems to actually read it regularly. I’m not complaining mind you – it’s sort of weird to put yourself out there and have virtual strangers walk up to you at school and tell you how much they liked that post you wrote where you admitted to pregaming PTO events. Sometimes I think I prefer the readers I don’t know, because it’s much easier to put things out there when my audience is complete strangers and not people you run into around town. Continue reading
A tale of chicken soup.
I am the first to admit that cooking meat is my culinary weak spot. Touching raw meat grosses me out. The idea that it could leave all sorts of nasty germs all over my kitchen freaks me out further. Really, I could go on & on about my beef with cooking meat, but I’ll spare you. Continue reading
Food Preservation Success. And Tofu.
I’d read in one of my food preservation books that I could freeze eggplant. I was slightly curious while worried it would turn mushy in the freezer. I do make a few batches of eggplant parmesan every summer, popping leftovers in the freezer for winter consumption, but I had never put up plain eggplant. I decided to try it with one – if it didn’t work, no biggie. Continue reading
Canning Confessions.
This is not what you want to see when you grab a jar of tomatoes off your shelves.
Something not soup.
I love to make big pots of soup this time of year. The house just feels cozier with something good smelling simmering on the stove all afternoon, you know? However, given that the habit of making a big pot of soup for dinner starts sometime in October, it begins to wear thin with some members of this household about this time of year – sort of like the grey sky or the weather forecast with the words snow or ‘polar vortex’. They’re just done with all of it. It certainly doesn’t help that I expect said pot of soup to serve as dinner a few days in a row as well as maybe even some lunches during that stretch. Change is needed and the easiest place to make it happen is the dinner table. Continue reading
Sort of in season.
Grandma’s fruitcake cookies are a holiday staple here. Which probably has you asking why I’m blogging about them in February, because everyone knows fruitcake is clearly a December holiday treat and not a February holiday treat. In the hustle & bustle & multiple cookie swaps that were December, the cookies didn’t get made. We had fourteen dozen cookies on hand – we didn’t need any more. As we don’t share these cookies well there was no way they were getting made for a swap for us to only have a few left on hand. No, we need the entire batch all to ourselves. Continue reading
The Holiday Party Weekend.
Between the three of us, we attended 5 holiday parties over the weekend that covered almost every aspect of the holiday. There were cookie swaps, bad christmas sweaters, wreath making, the Holly Ball and a bowling alley bash to be crammed into one gloriously, festive weekend.
That Apple Pie Jam I keep babbling about.
My friend Wynn shared this recipe for Rum Raisin Apple Pie Jam with me somewhere around my second bushel of apples this fall. It looked interesting, so I gave it a whirl. I followed the recipe to a T, with the exception of the sugar. 9 cups of sugar to 6 cups of apples? That made my teeth hurt just reading it. I cut the sugar back to 2 cups and used some of the excellent dark rum Peter brought Pat from Guatemala. Continue reading
Chicken Wire & Paper Flowers 