Sylvia's Scenario

Last night we hosted some of Bruce's work associates who were in town for the International Speciality Coffee Expo - one of our favorite conventions of the year.  I've blogged about it twice before,  here  and  here .  For dinner, I planned a similar dinner menu that I learned worked real well last year; I kept the carbs low in the meal (no potatoes and no bread or rolls) so everyone would enjoy the dessert more. Lower carbs in a meal means a less full, bloated feeling after eating. In other words, a feeling that you can still eat more...(and since I like to plan my meal around the dessert, this is a good thing.)  This year, I made my  Chocolate-Raspberry Cake  and like last year, it was the star of the show.   Last year, I made our favorite  Lemon Curd and White Chocolate Truffle Cake  that ended up being in my top three most popular recipes of 2017.  This recipe is just as good in my opinion.  I'd forgotten how good this recipe was until last night.  It isn

For our Masters Sunday meal yesterday, I came up with a menu of my favorite southern foods to cook, plus a few new items on the list.  One of the new foods was this pimento cheese dip.  I'm not a big fan of pimento cheese but it is so popular in the south.  At the Masters, they serve pimento cheese sandwiches for $1.50 each, one of the most popular concessions.  (the photo is compliments of Southern Cooking. ) The sandwiches are wrapped in green paper so they will blend in with the greens in case they end up blowing in the wind.  I could not take any photos when we were there in 2010 because they don't allow cameras or cell phones on the premises.  Such a shame.  In fact, you can't even take in a purse unless it's a very small size.  There are so many rules about Augusta National, period.  It was a very educational experience, to say the least.  We went with my sister, Barbara and her husband, Jim.  Bruce and Jim play golf together whenever they can.  Jim pla

The popular drink for Easter yesterday was this Vodka Strawberry Lemonade Cocktail from Heather Christo's blog  where I get a lot of my drink recipes.  We had eleven of my family over for Easter dinner and Lauren and Ari came over for breakfast.   We had our traditional family favorite,  Dutch Babies , for breakfast with lots of fresh berries on them.  The drinks were great for both meals and everyone loved them.   I simplified the recipe quite a bit than the original due to the fact that I had a lot of other food projects going on for this Easter but everyone still loved even the simplified version. I used frozen strawberries instead of fresh and I bought frozen lemonade instead of squeezing all those lemons to make fresh lemonade.   You can serve them as virgin strawberry lemonade, too, without the vodka.  I made two pitchers of them without the vodka and then added the vodka to those drinks who wanted alcohol (which was mostly everyone...)