Faith, Family, Food and Dogs

A few years ago, maybe more like a lifetime or two ago, when I lived in the mountains of western North Carolina we would spend our summers getting ready for the coming winter. We would work getting firewood cut, split and stacked, We made sure the family room and master bedroom had large stacks of firewood that would dry out as the summer progressed. We took down trees damaged by the winter storms and cut them into lengths to season for the next year. By Labor Day we were harvesting and canning the bounty from our garden, all the while knowing that by mid-September we would have a killing frost and by October the first snow fall would arrive. Now that I live in Florida and in an apartment there is no gardening, no preparing for the long and often snowy winter to come. Instead, I am trying to get as much outside stuff done as possible before the oppressive heat and humidity of the Florida summer sets in and I will loathe the thought of walking the girls. For the second and third tim...

St. Patrick's Day a time for good food and evenings with friends. Although they are not pictured here, I had a dear friend of 20 plus years and her boyfriend come for a belated St. Patrick's Day celebration. Since my everyday dishes are red I thought that putting them on green placemats would look more like Christmas and a lot less like spring. So, I put out the good china. Early in the day I got baking so the oven would be empty when the time came to put the corned beef in it. I made a strawberry layer cake with vanilla frosting and then put these shamrock sprinkles on it. They were edible but not very tasty. I made Irish Soda bread for the first time. I really liked how it turned out and will make this again. To go along with the corned beef and cabbage I made oven roasted red potato wedges. The potatoes are tossed with olive oil and crushed whole cloves of garlic and rosemary before going in the oven. The whole place smells of roasted garlic while they are cooking....

This dish came out of the same cookbook as the Baked Haddock. I needed orange juice and orange zest so I bought a large orange, could have used two. I got the marinade mixed up for the chicken. Orange juice, soy sauce, sherry and garlic. The chicken soaking in the marinade. It needs to sit for 20 minutes. While the chicken was soaking I sliced up the onion and pepper. Next up was the bok choi. The recipe called for 5 cups but I only got four so I made do with that. Once the chicken was cooked it was set aside, While the vegetables cooked. Once the veggies are cooked you add the chicken back in and thicken it all up. Chicken and Vegetable Stir Fry 1/2 tsp grated orange peel 1/3 cup orange juice 2 tblsp low sodium soy sauce 2 tblsp dry sherry (I used Cream Sherry because that is what I had) 2 cloves garlic, minced (I used 4 cloves) 12 ozs boneless, skinless chicken breasts, sliced 1/4 inch thick 1 tblsp cornstarch 2-1/2 tsp vegetable oil 5 packed cups of bok...

I am really trying to be good. I have started doing interval aerobics or yoga in the mornings. I am watching my food portions and I am eating a lot more seafood. I came across this recipe in my Picture Perfect Weight Loss Cookbook by Dr. Howard M. Shapiro. I got all my ingredients together. Here is the recipe. I sliced up the onions and put them on the baking sheet. I put the fish on the onions. Topped with the tomatoes and ready to go in the oven. The finished meal. I made some couscous to go with it and mixed green beans into it. It was pretty tasty.However, next time I would saute the onions a little bit first, they were a tad to strong. I would also chop up the tomatoes instead of the slices.

It is now March and we are back to The Real Florida . This was another eye opening trip. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote several books; The Yearling (which became a movie) and Cross Creek, among many others. She bought the Cross Creek property in 1928. At the time it was a 72-acre orange grove with some cattle, a milk cow, a mule, ducks, geese and chickens. There was no indoor plumbing, no electricity and you had to use an outhouse. There was a hand water pump near the kitchen. Even today it is still in a fairly remote location and I could only try to imagine how isolated and rural it must have been when she first bought the place. A quote of hers on the sign in the parking lot. Another quote of hers a few steps inside the gates of the property. A lot of the orange grove is gone, taken back over by the natural woods. Within the small gated area around the house there are a few trees. This one still had fruit on its higher branches. Here is the duck pen and behind it another...