Sylvia's Scenario

My cooking usually runs pretty simple with not a lot of exotic ingredients but I try to make each dish as tasty as possible.  One of my favorite things to do is to invite guests over for dinner and ask them if they can guess "the secret ingredient" in a dish.  I did this with my peach pie  recipe this past summer when I added the secret ingredient, cayenne pepper.  We served that at two different times with guests here and played that "secret ingredient" game while we enjoyed our dessert.  People are intrigued by it.   It's a fun bit of entertainment while you savour a new dish.   This month, we played it three times when I made my  pumpkin flan  recipe for guests who came over for dinner.  After such a busy month of October with baseball, our November has been very low-key so we decided to get caught up with friends and ended up having four little dinner parties serving a nice, fall meal at each one. I love fall food anyway after barbec...

This month has been a whirlwind of activity and mental exhaustion known to baseball fans as October baseball.  Our team, the Seattle Mariners, made it to the MLB playoffs and kept winning.  They've made it to the playoffs before, exactly six times since their inaugural year of 1977, but this year they kept winning. This year they made it to game 7 of the ALCS (American League Championship Series) after winning the ALDS (American League Division Series) against Detroit.  Not only did we make it to game 7, they were ahead in the game through seven innings before they lost to the Toronto Blue Jays.  That's the closest they have ever gotten to the World Series...within 3 innings.  Agonizing, to say the least.   Playoff games are not like regular season games at all.  They're much more intense and there is lot more strategy applied by the coaches like the way they use the pitchers, how they arrange the batting lineup, etc.  There is a lot to understand...

    Bruce's birthday this year was more of a low key birthday than last year when he had four different celebrations for turning 70. Another year has gone by already and here we are celebrating again. This year, we went to Seaside, Oregon; one of our favorite spots to go to for the past 35 years. We have lots of wonderful memories here and still love going to Seaside whenever we get the chance. This year, Lauren was able to join us since she now lives in Portland which is only an hour and a half away from Seaside vs. the three and a half hours away for us. We spent the weekend in Portland and then drove out to the beach for Bruce's birthday on Monday. She was a great host in Portland and we had a wonderful barbecue at her house similar to what we've been doing all summer. I guess she inherited my genes... She and her boyfriend, Dustin, took us out to many of Portland's finest eating scenes and there are many.   They live in a very cute neighborhood with lots of neighbo...