Sylvia's Scenario

Happy 2023.  We started our New Year with the most delicious dinner on New Year's Day at our house watching the Seahawk football game (they won- Go Hawks!) and then we had a few people over for dinner.  It turned out to be a really fun day and a good opportunity for me to cook up this ham that we get every year from a vendor that Bruce works with.  It's an Amana Ham from Iowa.  Amana is a quaint German town in Iowa that we visited many times when we lived in Iowa in the 80's.  Bruce had a friend from college who was from Amana and his family owned the restaurant in town called the  Ronneburg Restaurant  that is still there.  We had many good meals and lots of fun memories with the Oehler family at that restuarant.  Now, we still get a taste of Amana every year with this ham that we receive.  I try to cook it when we will have a lot of people over.  In past years, we've served it for our Super Bowl parties that we would host before t...

Tonight, we had a family dinner of game hens, broccolini,  dill bread , wild rice casserole and pecan pie for dessert before we opened presents from Japan from Nick and Sachiyo.  They leave December 9th so we are having our Christmas early while they are here.   I know this doesn't sound like a Christmas dinner but Nick is putting in requests of what he'd like to eat while he's home and I am doing my best to accommodate him - pecan pie, roast beef and gravy, Great Harvest cinnamon rolls - to name a few favorites.  I almost forgot to take a photo of my plate, most of my broccolini is gone...and you can see that I like a little butter on my dill bread. I love wild rice but it can be hard to prepare because it is so tough.  It isn't a rice at all but a type of grass and it can be quite expensive.  We got this wild rice from Bruce's nephew and wife who live in Minnesota where wild rice is a native plant.  I use to make this re...

This past weekend, we took a trip to   Iowa   to celebrate Bruce's mom's 90th birthday.  The majority of the family was there totaling approximately 30 people, all from the single couple of Ken and Ann Bratney. Ann turned 90 and we all came near and far to help her celebrate. Ken and Ann have been married for 66 years and they had 5 children (one being my husband, Bruce).  All the children have had children and now our nieces and nephews have children.  The siblings, cousins, and second cousins all have a lot of fun together on these special occasions. It has been a joy to see all the nieces and nephews grow over the years and turn into such wonderful, fun-loving adults. To celebrate, we had the most appropriate - Iowa beef. The brothers did an excellent job with the barbecue. Iowa is such a fun place to visit with so much farmland everywhere and "farm" being the theme where ever you go something I never...

I recently returned from a trip to Iowa where Bruce and I visited his parents and a few nieces and nephews.  Bruce is from Iowa and we actually lived there a couple years in our early days of marriage and the main thing I remember about those days is all the corn. Lots and lots of corn growing in Iowa. Everywhere you look. I didn't know until I moved to Iowa that all this corn you see is growing to feed cattle, not for people.  I remember when Bruce started explaining to me how it all works.  The Iowa corn goes to animal feed, or for seeds to grown more corn, or for making inexpensive additives for processed foods.  I was so confused about it at the time.  But it did explain why Bruce always called corn-on-the-cob "sweet corn". I finally said to him during our early days of dating in Seattle, "why do you always say 'sweet corn', all corn is sweet!"  I wasn't from Iowa so I didn't know that there was 'seed corn' and '...

We had our final barbecue last weekend and since I knew it would be our last of the summer, I choose to have my favorite marinated meat - teriyaki flank steak.   This was always Nick and Lauren's birthday dinner request (both have birthdays in July - right in the middle of barbecue season!)  When Lauren was around 6 years old, she requested teriyaki flank steak for her birthday but I was so busy getting ready for her big day and preparing all the festivities that I decided to buy a bottled teriyaki marinade to save me time and use that instead of this recipe.  When Lauren took her first bite of her dinner she yelled out "This isn't what I wanted for my birthday!!"    I felt so bad and after that I never tried another teriyaki marinade.  This is the tried and true one. Where did this recipe come from?  Well, that's another story. It's actually from the cookbook A Taste of Terrace Hill .  Where is Terrace Hill, you ask?  It is wh...