I kicked off the week with a massive chicken cooking date with Liz: we lightly fried and grilled chicken tenders and threw in a batch of quick split pea soup. I continued in full force with Suzy and our every Tuesday plan with an incredible homemade tomato sauce and delectable veal parmesan dinner ...
Kitchen Chronicles
Sausage Making with (or rather “for”) Lou
Lou usually beckons me with an e-vite that makes cooking with him nearly impossible to turn down. He refers to me as the “loveliest” in his requests for my attendance for various cooking adventures -- homemade pasta, bread, or something more involved like his delicious eggplant caponata. This time ...
Parallel Power Cooking
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It's going to be an every Tuesday 12:00 to 2:00 pm gig, with the end time being non-negotiable since I need to be available to manage my two middle school kids the second they walk in the door at 2:30. Suzy, temporarily without a kitchen, is desperate to make her family dinner. She knows how bad ...
Soup and Conversation
With a little snip of rosemary, some large cuts of kale and a lot of conversation, my friend Jackie and I convened in my kitchen recently for some much-needed catch up time. She was just back from a family trip to Italy, and had little left in her fridge and I was starved for some girlfriend time. ...
Cheesy Calm Before Irene
There’s an eerie calm around here while getting ready for Irene to strike. Everyone is doing their last minute preparations — stocking up on food, removing patio furniture, going to the ATM’s, filling cars with gas, trying to get in some last minute exercise and scouring the hardware stores for a ...
Tomato Gold
Ok, I admit it. I dropped many hints with Lou that this year, I wanted to be part of his end-of-summer sauce-making extravaganza. After lending a hand last year and seeing his super-efficient garage set up allow him to process hundreds of quarts of gorgeous tomato puree, I knew I had to be a part of ...
Calling All Cooking Friends
With summer speeding by and all these farm fresh fruits and vegetables ripe for the picking, I’ve got some hard core cooking and freezing to do! (But first I need to call someone to take a look at my freezer, which isn’t doing its freezing job quite the way it should.) And then second is make some ...
An Old Fashioned Cooking Date
I long for an occasional rainy day in the summer. Sunshine and warm weather, enjoyable as they are, scatter friends at pools, lakes and beaches and hinder precious cooking together times. Throw in various vacation schedules and weeks go by in the summer where cooking with friends just doesn’t ...
The Contagious Effect
It was a sticky and rainy Monday, an indoor day. So instead of heading to a pool or lake, my friend Lynn brought her two kids to my house. Our older kids could hang out, the little ones could play and the moms? What else but cook. There’s too much time to just sit around and talk all day while the ...
Chronicles of a Postage Stamp Gardener: A Major Stumbling Block
Evidently, my garden was thriving while I was away. Neighbors helped out in preventing over-ripening — and got some nice veggies for their trouble. And before I left, we all enjoyed many salads, petit peas, string beans, fabulous kale, beets, cherry tomatoes and even carrots. I’d say my postage ...