Various ramblings about food: growing, buying, cooking and of course — eating!
I’m happy to finally be able to re-launch Home-Cooked-Meals! You may have noticed that I haven’t had time for the blog lately. I haven’t been doing a whole lot of cooking either. I’ve returned to working on websites to make ends meet, and some things just had to give. Typically, my own websites are the …
My mother didn’t really organize recipes. She stuffed them in books, in amongst other papers, wrote them on envelopes, put them in her appointment book with clients’ phone numbers on them. My grandmother seems not to have organized hers, either. When my mother passed away, I found a shoebox full of old recipes. As I …
I’m exhausted. A friend asked me yesterday if we could do a bulk-cooking session today. With one thing or another, we hadn’t been able to get together for a while, so this was an unexpected treat. Even better…she offered to do all of the shopping if I could get her the list in an hour. …
A few weeks ago I went over to my neighbor’s house and she served me the most amazing Asian-inspired pickles. Carrots, celery, various colored bell peppers, daikon, and ginger combined to make this delicious treat I could NOT get enough of. The problem is, you can’t buy this in a store. She graciously offered to …
After weeks of moving, I finally have the new kitchen functional…and wow…is it amazing. My father-in-law is so wonderful to let us live here! Part of what took so long was combining 3 kitchens into one. We feel so blessed to have inherited a lot of spices and baking supplies! The kitchen includes abundant counter …
Yesterday was one of the days when I just wandered from market to market. We started with Rosabella’s Garden Bakery where I bought my annual box of apples — a box of Jonagolds that were very red, a color variation I hadn’t seen before. Of course we had to sample their fresh baked goods and …
I didn’t feel like going out to buy food yesterday. As I started cooking, firing up the trusty cast-iron dutch-oven, my husband asked what was for dinner. "Whatever falls in this pot." No, I wasn’t feeling terribly creative. I looked around the kitchen and found: onions. He’d done a lovely camp-out cooking job for some …
One of my dear friends came over to cook last week and left me speechless as she explained to me "the right way" to make lasagna. It turns out I’ve been doing it wrong all these years. My family hasn’t seemed to notice, though. After I seemed so startled, she said we’d make two: one …
So, I was hungry and didn’t want to spend a lot of time cooking. I also didn’t want to part with any money. I looked in the freezer and found — fish balls. I’d forgotten I had those! In the subsequent flurry of activity, I tossed the fish balls, frozen green beans, leftover cilantro, leftover …
I haven’t felt much like cooking in the last few days. Big adventures, planning out the summer’s activities for the family and getting the kids through the last days of school have drained my energy. We’ve been eating out of the freezer and I used one of my precious pizza days. $10 pizza from Papa …