Gourmet Cooking from Your Pantry Having a well-stocked pantry is a way to hedge off inflation. It saves trips to the grocery store and when you’re in a bind, you can come up with delicious meals in minutes. I’ll be testing new gourmet pantry recipes during the coming weeks. If you have a favorite recipe, [...]

The challenging question about a kitchen garden is “What to do with all that produce which comes in all at once?” I planted 5 tomato plants. Two plants are cherry tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes a wonderfully sweet and a bonus is they ripen early. We have been enjoying them for weeks, while the other tomatoes are [...]

Chickpea-Cucumber-Tomato Salad Bounty from my Garden Even after two hailstorms, my garden is producing. I lost most of my cucumber plants in the first hailstorm, but a couple managed to pull through. The tomato plants survived, because I covered them with trashcans. I had a lot of ripe cherry tomatoes, so I used them, but [...]

We began the growing season with a devastating hailstorm in June. If I had not be at home to tarp my budding garden, I would have lost everything, as my neighbors did. As it was, I lost about a 1/3 of my veggie garden. I replanted the rows lost and waited for the rest to [...]

What do you do when you have lovely garden bounty and wisdom teeth removed? Make soup! In preparation of my recovery, I made several batches of soup. I knew that at least for a couple of days I would be on a liquid diet and I wanted variety. I made a vegetable soup, tomato soup [...]

Have a famished crowd to feed at breakfast? Do you want an easy-to-grab and eat-on-the-go healthy meal? Then this recipe is for you. You can make Easy Cheesy Egg Casserole ahead. It’ll keep nicely several days in the refrigerator. When you’re running out the door cut out a square or two, heat it up and [...]

I ordered White Chili while dining out last week. I ran home to recreate the recipe, because I enjoyed it so much. This is a nice change from my normal chili recipe. Its creamy flavor is accented by the heat of chili powder. You’ll want to adjust the chili powder to your family’s taste, but [...]

Avocado Creamsicle This creamsicle recipe was inspired by one in Jordon Rubin’s ezine. As odd as an avocado sounds for a frozen treat, remember it’s a fruit. I thought, “Why not?” I gave his recipe a try. After adjusting it a bit, after all most kids expect a Popsicle to be super sweet, I thought [...]

…Make Lemonade Besides being summer’s most refreshing drink, lemons have an interesting history. Sailors on long sea journeys often developed scurvy, which results from a vitamin C deficiency. When the sailors consumed lemons and limes they’d stay healthy. English sailors earned the nickname “limey” from eating citrus on the high sea. Not only are lemons high in C, but potassium and [...]

I was looking for ways to use sauerkraut. This is a twist on Shepard’s Pie. Naturally fermented sauerkraut adds a spectrum of nutrients to this ol’ standby recipe. You’ll want to purchase natural sauerkraut with no added vinegars available in most natural food stores. Naturally fermented sauerkraut contains beneficial live bacteria which aid digestion and [...]