When you cook at home, you need pantry staples and refrigerator basics for cooking healthy, wholesome food from scratch. I try and keep the basics on hand so that I’m ready to cook or bake but my kitchen is small and I don’t have much space for storing items. How our freezer gets used helps… Continue reading How Our Freezer Gets Used
Tag: scratch kitchen
Weekly Meal Plan with Garden Failures
This time of year is all about eating what’s fresh and grown in our garden (or in my neighbor’s garden – with permission of course) before it goes bad. Harvest season really does happen in the city – even in small backyards like ours. We had some successes in the growing department and other-not-successes at… Continue reading Weekly Meal Plan with Garden Failures
Apples, Walnuts, and Cinnamon
This is a recipe my husband has been making for us since we moved into our house, 17 years ago. Our next door neighbors have an apple tree in their front yard and they don’t eat any of the apples from the tree but they’re thrilled that we do. While applesauce is also good to… Continue reading Apples, Walnuts, and Cinnamon
Weekly Meal Plan and Feast Portland
I had the pleasure of attending the very festive and fun food event in Portland last weekend, Feast Portland: Celebration of Oregon Bounty. It was an absolute food lovers delight and was sponsored by Bon Appetit. The session I attended was outdoors and was all about sampling delicious food and wine from artisans and companies… Continue reading Weekly Meal Plan and Feast Portland
How to Roast Tomatoes
There have been so many tomatoes turning red on my tomato vines the past couple of weeks, I’ve been roasting tomatoes like crazy. If you’ve always wanted to know how to roast tomatoes, it’s super easy and there’s no blanching, scooping out of seeds or food waste. Once you’ve roasted tomatoes, you can make… Continue reading How to Roast Tomatoes
Weekly Meal Plan
Whenever we have dinner at our friend's house, Chris and Laura, I know it’s going to be good. Last year, they had us over for dinner and served the most wonderful beef brisket and chocolate cake. There were other dishes served but these were the most memorable. My husband loves to eat meat and would… Continue reading Weekly Meal Plan
Weekly Meal Plan
My sweet sister, Mary, and her new husband, Weston, visited us this past weekend. My brother-in-law had a seminar in town so they both traveled from Anchorage, where they live and stayed with us. On Sunday night, instead of my son cooking his weekly meal, the newly-weds took our family out to dinner at the… Continue reading Weekly Meal Plan
My Great-Grandmother’s Recipes
I inherited something recently that is very precious: this little notebook. It’s filled with recipes from the kitchen of my maternal great-grandmother, Clara E. Walters. Here’s a picture of her, at age 20, back in 1906. She was an original – for many reasons. I love how she wrote down recipes on the backs of… Continue reading My Great-Grandmother’s Recipes
Weekly Meal Plan
Do you ever plant a vegetable in your garden and then wonder if it will grow or not? For me, planting artichokes in the garden felt like a real gamble. Really? Artichokes? Actually, we didn't even plant them in our garden. They are very nice looking plants and we put them in our front yard… Continue reading Weekly Meal Plan
Easiest Applesauce Ever
The thought of making applesauce used to turn me off completely. All that peeling, slicing, and coring of apples made me a regular purchaser of “store-bought- applesauce” as we called it. Then one day, no doubt after buying a jar of very expensive organic applesauce for snacks, I thought to myself: “What if I don’t… Continue reading Easiest Applesauce Ever