Sylvia's Scenario

This is a nice saucy chicken recipe that we had for dinner after a day of rain, sleet and snow.  Yes, it's that time of year.  The suburbs got more snow than we did here in the city which is fine with me.  The grandkids had a very fun time with it. Me?  I like the snow just fine as long as I don't have to drive in it with all the hills around here.  To be perfectly honest, I'm just happy staying warm and toasty inside making Christmas cookies or thinking about the next thing to cook for dinner.  If it's not soup or stew, then it has to be something with lots of sauce.  I got this recipe from  Hannah Freese, RD ; Bruce added a baked potato to his plate that was prefect for soaking up all the sauce because it is so tasty.  I wanted to make this recipe because it included kale.  I'm not much of a kale connoisseur so usually avoid it but it's so full of nutrition (being a "super food")  that I do try to find recipes that I might li...

Our first winter storm of the season has hit after a summer of only 0.13 inches of rain. Bummer.  Summer was fun while it lasted.  My sister came to visit from Colorado just in time for the bad weather, too.  Another bummer.  We knew it was coming so on our last day of sunny weather, we headed to the gorgeous  Bloedel Reserve  on Bainbridge Island, just a 30 minute ferry ride away.  It is one of North America's 10 best botanical gardens, all 150 acres of it.   It was a perfect way to begin her visit since we always have lots of sister-talk to get caught up when we see each other again.  The trails at Bloedel Reserve are listed as 2 1/2 miles but there are a lot of back-trails and view points to wander off on so we did a lot more than that.  And all the trails are immaculately maintained.  You can choose to spend a lot of time here since there are numerous benches to sit on and we often did that to take pause of all the natural beaut...

This recipe doesn't look like much but it's super easy to make, super healthy to eat and amazingly delicious.  It's the special dill sauce that does it, I think.  You bake the salmon on top of the cabbage and kale so all the juices cook into the vegetables which adds such great flavor and softens the texture.  I've never been a big kale fan but since I started  Hannah Freese, RD  diet, I've been surprisingly eating a lot of kale and don't really mind it.  I've been buying Trader Joe's packaged kale that will last 2-3 meals and then I don't have to mess with cleaning it.  Unlike lettuce, I don't think packaged kale tastes any different that fresh kale but I can really taste a difference with lettuce so I always buy fresh lettuce.  The cabbage in this recipe is a lot like my  roast chicken with cabbage  recipe that is so simple, yet so tasty.  This salmon recipe is good enough to serve to guests or for a special occasion, it's that go...

Have you started eating fall food yet? We had our first soup dinner tonight during the Seahawk game for Sunday Night Football (in an empty CenturyLink field thanks to covid). It wasn't really a soup-kind-of-day but was actually a beautiful day in the upper 60's. But fall is in the air so I felt like soup. We set up our new deck furniture in preparation of fall since we can feel it coming.  We ordered our furniture on May 5th and only got it last week, September 11th to be exact.  That was when we were in the midst of the wildfire smoke so our furniture came, they put it on the deck and we never even went out there because of the smoke.  All we could do was look at it from out the window. So disappointing after waiting so long!  Supposedly, anything that is ordered is taking a very long time due to covid, except Amazon, of course. Amazon just continues to save the day, don't they?  Thank goodness because I've been using them so much since covid which is why ...

Happy St. Patrick's Day! I'm starting my day with a green smoothie, appropriate for St. Patrick's Day today and also appropriate after a week of eating  Southern cooking  in  Savannah .   (Not that I'm complaining or anything)  I've posted a couple other   green smoothies   on my blog in the past but it seems like each time I make one, it's always a little different depending on the ingredients I have on hand so there is really no wrong or right recipe. There are few "must haves" for making a green smoothie, however.  First of all, you must have something "green".  Today, I used kale. And usually there is a banana thrown in a green smoothie. After than, I decided to add a sliced apple, a kiwi (because it's green). Another "must have" is a liquid.  I like to use coconut water as my liquid because it is high in potassium and no matter how many bananas, tomatoes, potatoes or oranges you eat, it's alw...

Tonight we had chili for dinner because of the frigid temperatures we've been having.  It has not been above freezing for about two weeks and this morning it was -2 degrees which is unheard of around here.  Bruce went skiing with a couple of buddies at our local ski area which is less than an hour away. It was beautiful weather up there, nearly 40 degrees.  We are in an "inversion" right now where the cold air is trapped under low pressure keeping it cold and frigid. But if you go up in elevation and above the valley we live in, it gets a lot warmer and nice!  So, that's what Bruce decided to do today.  I told him I would make chili and  corn bread  for dinner. I don't really have a recipe for chili, I just make it with whatever I have in the kitchen.  This batch turned out really good so I'm going to post it.  I put kale in it which worked great.  Another way to include kale in my diet without really tasting it... ...