Sylvia's Scenario

One last zucchini recipe before summer ends and then I promise I will done with zucchini.  I got this recipe from my neighbor, Karen, who likes to entertain with parties at her house.  I've written about her parties before  here ,  here  and  here  just to list a few.  This month she had a Hawaiian-themed barbecue for seven of us neighbors with a wonderful dinner of barbecued ribs, chicken, pork, potatoes, Caesar salad, macaroni salad along with shrimp skewer appetizers and dessert of  pineapple upside-down cake .  Our cocktails for the party were Lava Flows, one of my favorite Hawaiian drinks.  They are like a pina colada only with strawberry swirled throughout. Yum! We had a beautiful day for the party and it was a great success.  I even brought my ukulele and played some Hawaiian music for some background music which quickly put everyone in the mood.  They all loved that unexpected bit of entertainment.   I know su...

I wanted to make an  apple pie  this year for the Fourth of July since it was our country's 250th birthday and what is more American than apple pie?  Since we were going to a large party, I decided to make a big slab apple pie that serves a couple dozen people.   Pie is my favorite thing to make so I was eager to make my first pie of the summer.  This pie is made on a cookie sheet so there is less filling and more crust (which is no problem because this crust is AMAZING). This works well for a potluck or large crowd because it's easy to serve.  It's a pie that is like serving browies or some other dessert bar, no gooey mess to deal with like with a conventional pie.   But it tastes like a perfect apple pie.   I have not made a slab pie before but I've eaten one.  My neighbor brought one to a barbecue we had at our house back in 2015 when she brought a  mixed berry slab pie  for dessert.  She gave me the recipe and I put it on m...

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 that always makes it more of 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 c...

We picked twelve cups of blackberries the other day while we had visitors here and turned it into blackberry coffee cake.  This recipe used 3-1/2 cups of blackberries so I also made two loaves of  blackberry bread   and the most popular  blackberry cobbler  that got eaten so fast I never got a photo of it.  And I still have blackberries leftover.  All these recipes are from a very old cookbook of mine called Wild & Free Blackberries that I've had since around the mid-1990's.    And this is definitely the time of year that this little cookbook is sitting out on my kitchen counter.  We picked them at our local golf course because Bruce sees how plentiful they are when he plays golf and he has been eager to get us out there to pick and we finally did. Our visitors have returned home now but they had three children who LOVED picking blackberries and also LOVED eating them.  They were children of Bruce's nephew who was here with his ...