My best friend’s birthday was this week. We’ve been friends for twenty-two years, going back to when we first moved into our new homes on the same street of a spanking new development. Although she and her family moved from Cleveland, and we moved from Chicago, we were each experiencing the same feelings of excitement,…
Favorite Meat Loaf
When you can open an eight hundred and seventy-seven page hard bound cookbook automatically to the page that holds the recipe for your favorite meat loaf, it’s a good bet you’ve been to that page many, many times before. This is the case with my copy of James Beard’s American Cookery, and his recipe for…
Chocolate Bonbons
Recently I made these Chocolate Bonbons to take to my sister’s. She shared them with her neighbor, who recently sent me a message asking if I would share the recipe with her because her family really loved them. So here it is… This recipe comes from one of the first cookbooks I purchased when I…
Today was an exciting day! My husband and I went to Sur La Table at Pentagon Row where Ina Garten, also known as The Barefoot Contessa was signing her newest book, How Easy Is That? I have actually never been to a book signing. Many years ago when I moved to the Washington, DC area…
Beef, Barley, And Butternut Squash Stew
This is a recipe I adapted from the current issue of Fine Cooking magazine. The original recipe calls for serving it with blue cheese croutons, which is a mixture of butter, blue cheese and walnuts spread on baguette slices and broiled til crisp. I preferred to serve this more as a soup than a stew…
DRESSED FOR FALL…with each season I enjoy decorating the front entrance to our home to reflect the time of the year. Our temperatures have been wildly erratic so far this autumn going from normal cool and crisp days to temps in the high 70’s which is predicted for today, and then back to a low…
Boeuf Bourguignon (Beef Stew With Red Wine)
This hearty beef stew, or Boeuf Bourguignon as the French call it, is a meal you’ll remember whether you’re dining in a cozy French bistro or in the warmth of your own home. The recipe is from Ina Garten’s Barefoot In Paris Cookbook. All of the dishes she writes about in this book are true…
Chili
With the weather turning chilly, one’s thoughts naturally turn to Chili! There are endless varieties of this warming comfort food… with ground beef or cubed beef, or no beef at all, with or without tomatoes, with or without beans, with beer or without, and the choice of spices too many to mention. I know there…
The Best Chocolate Chip Cookie Ever
Chocolate Chip Cookies…is there anyone who doesn’t love them? I doubt it. The very first thing I ever baked was chocolate chip cookies. I was probably about 12 years old, and I followed the recipe on the back of the bag of Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chips. They turned out great, and it became my…
Roasted Vegetable Lasagne
If you look the word adapt up in the dictionary you will find that it means to make suitable to requirements or conditions, adjust or modify fittingly. This recipe for Roasted Vegetable Lasagne is a result of my efforts to create a lasagne which would appeal to my husband’s tastes. I may have mentioned before…