Sylvia's Scenario

I have a perfect football playoff recipe to share since it's getting down to the wire for the Super Bowl.  You could easily serve these for a super bowl party or for any of the playoff games.  I made them for our Seahawks game when they clinched the playoffs on New Year's Day .  We had a little football party at our house on that day and then ten people came over for dinner.  It was a fun way to start our New Year.    Unfortunately, the Seahawks lost their first playoff game but it was exciting while it lasted.  As I write this, we are vacationing in Hawaii recovering from a busy holiday season.  And it's a great way to recover.  Every night is a gorgeous sunset so we always plan where we want to be each evening to watch it.  We are on the Big Island of Hawaii on the Kona coast which is where we like to come in Hawaii.  This year we made a family vacation out of it since Lauren, Nick, Sachiyo and the grandkids were all able to ...

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...

I will admit, this was a different kind of Easter but not necessarily food-wise.  We ate REAL good this year.  The sad part was not being able to share it with other's and partake in this wonderful time of year with my family.  I made my  Easter Bread  and divided it into two smaller loaves so I could take one over to Lauren, so I did get to share some of it, although I didn't get to see the shear joy on her face from eating it. That is probably my favorite part of cooking - watching other people eat it. Since we are all encouraged to wear masks now, we have three N95 masks that Bruce had in his car for when he visits construction sites.  I told Lauren I would bring one over to her on Saturday so I also decided to take her over a loaf of Easter bread while I was at it.  She was much appreciative and it was good to see each other.  We met outside her apartment building and then I waited while she took the bread up into her apartment.  The...

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...