Sylvia's Scenario

In our family, Father's Day and baseball go hand in hand so once again this year we were off to another Mariner baseball game for Father's Day, one of Bruce's favorite pastimes.  My brother was visiting so he and his wife joined us.  They were here to attend the World Cup where Seattle is one of the cities in North America hosting games.  We are having six games here, including the USA team where they won their match. It was definitely on my brother's bucket list to experience such a thing since they are huge soccer fans so I'm glad we could accommodate them during their visit. Father's Day was a beautiful day this year and the Mariners won so it was a fun day.  Bruce barbecued hamburgers which is another one of his favorite pastimes - having a barbecue.   My sister brought a fruit salad, my nephew brought our favorite  Pasta & Co.  house salad, and I made a family favorite  pasta colelsaw . Bruce offered three kinds of cheeseburgers.  Wh...

Chocolate cream pie was always my dad's favorite dessert.  This year for Father's Day, we decided to celebrate my dad since my kids were not here and my sister's kids were not here.  However, my other sister and her husband were visiting from Colorado and her son lives here so she was the lucky one.  My brother and his wife also were visiting from Idaho so four of the seven children were here to honor my dad on Father's Day and that's just what we did. Below are all of us in 1979; my mom and dad and the five girls and two boys.  My dad was always so proud of all of us and we all wanted to make him proud, too, and with no strings attached.  We talk about that often, even to this day, about how we all turned out to be fairly well adjusted people even though our parents were not strict parents at all.  The fact that we survive our wild years of youth all in one piece is amazing!  We're old now (boo hoo) but still in one piece aside from a few joint replac...

This year was a busy Father's Day but that's okay because the past few months have been rather relaxing for us.  I'm not going to say "boring" because the older I get, the more I like those kind of days and "boring" connotes negativity which isn't how it’s been at all.  I guess if we're  not traveling or having out-of-town visitors coming to our house, then our typical days are just "relaxing" and there's nothing wrong with that.  But this past weekend, my brother and wife came to Seattle so I decided to plan a family barbecue while they were here which ended up being on Father’s Day. After dealing with covid the past four years, I feel like I am getting back into the hang of hosting large gatherings again. I admit that I did get out of practice there for awhile.  The end of March was our Mariner Ticket Party and we'd only been home a few days from a visit to Washington D.C. but we threw that one together pretty well and everyon...

Are you running out of ideas for hot weather dinners yet?  It seems like all over the country places are having record breaking hot weather these days, as we are, too, in Seattle.  We are eating lots of salads and I just added this one to my list.  It's like a taco salad except it has a cheeseburger-take instead. And I like it better than just making a cheeseburger and wrapping it in lettuce as a bun like the paleo people do.  I thought this salad was a good idea.  I got the recipe from  Hannah Freese, RD  and we had it for dinner tonight and Bruce really liked it, too.  We had three days of over 100 degrees recently that broke records around here but fortunately we have air conditioning upstairs, plus a cool basement, and a big east-facing deck that cools off at night.  Less than 50% of households have air conditioning in Seattle so it's a big deal when the weather gets hot here.  People's houses get over 90 degrees inside and it can ge...

For Father's Day this year, we barbecued a pot roast in honor of my dad.  This was one of his summer specialties and one that was always my favorite.  He didn't have the recipe written down so I've been trying to figure out how to make the pot roast taste the way he made it.   He made his own barbecue sauce and then just let the pot roast slowly cook on the rotisserie barbecue all day.  It was a great way to spend a summer day in the backyard with a wonderful meal at the end of it all.  Here's a photo of one of those barbecues in 1989 with my dad holding Nick.  You can see the rotisserie turkey on the table which was another one of his specialities.   My dad passed away in 1993 but we would often have barbecues in his memory like we did in 2014 on his birthday during  Memorial Day  when we lived in Idaho.  I've been trying to duplicate his barbecued pot roast recipe and I finally came up with a sauce recipe that tast...