Sylvia's Scenario

I have another summer garden recipe but it's not zucchini this time. We also have an abundance of tomatoes.  Depending on what you have in your garden, this recipe also has corn, pototoes, basil, chives, and dill.  But even if you don't have a garden, this is a good summer soup anyway.  The corn-on-the-cob this summer has been amazingly sweet.  When I saw this recipe, the first thing I thought of was "Oh boy! I can buy more corn!"  The other thing I thought of was how I can use some coho salmon that Lauren brought home from Alaska.  She returned last week after a visit there for the first time to spend some time with her boyfriend's family who is from Alaska.  And they did A LOT of fishing.    Her boyfriend's parents have two boats; a working boat and a recreational boat and they went out in both multiple times. They caught so much fish and Lauren caught some, too.  She was thrilled.  I can't believe how much she knows about fishi...

One last zucchini recipe before summer ends and then I promise I will done with zucchini.  I got this recipe from my neighbor, Karen, who likes to entertain with parties at her house.  I've written about her parties before  here ,  here  and  here  just to list a few.  This month she had a Hawaiian-themed barbecue for seven of us neighbors with a wonderful dinner of barbecued ribs, chicken, pork, potatoes, Caesar salad, macaroni salad along with shrimp skewer appetizers and dessert of  pineapple upside-down cake .  Our cocktails for the party were Lava Flows, one of my favorite Hawaiian drinks.  They are like a pina colada only with strawberry swirled throughout. Yum! We had a beautiful day for the party and it was a great success.  I even brought my ukulele and played some Hawaiian music for some background music which quickly put everyone in the mood.  They all loved that unexpected bit of entertainment.   I know su...

We are in the midst of zucchini season and trying hard to eat up our zucchini from the garden. I've already made our popular pizza stuffed zucchini boats a few times using up several zucchini and we got our pizza fix at the same time. But this zucchini turkey skillet dish is really my favorite.  It's sort of take on shakshuka, the Middle Eastern egg and tomato dish.  I think you could make this zucchini skillet dish for a brunch, as well as for any dinner.  This is a recipe from Hannah Freese, RD and we make it a lot, even when it's not zucchini season because it's so easy and quick to make.   It's a good one-dish meal where you will get a good helping of vegetables and fiber without even trying.  The recipe says it will serve 4 but honestly, Bruce will eat half of this recipe.  I like it leftover for breakfast when I cook the eggs into the sauce.  You can make it for dinner with or without the eggs, depending on how hardy of a meal you want.  I...

As always, July is flying by with all the celebrations this month.  Nick's family is not here this year so that makes it a little more quiet (since he has three summer birthdays in his family) but Lauren was here one weekend so we celebrated her, we've celebrated  my birthday  and last weekend we celebrated our anniversary; a significant one of 45 years.   Since it was such a turning point anniversary, we also took a trip in May to celebrate by taking a seven day Alaska cruise that left out of Seattle so it was super easy to do.  We've always love cruises and now we decided we like cold weather cruises, too. Alaska was so fun; bundling up and being in cold, snowy weather in a vast wildness was very exciting. We may do a coolcation more often.  We took the White Pass & Yukon Railway at Skagway and it was so snowy up at the top of the pass.   The train is a real old-fashioned train that rides on a historic narrow-gauge railroad built in 1898 for the ...