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...

Green bean casserole, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, yams, green gelatin salad, rolls...you know the drill. It's Thanksgiving, once again, with all the usual fixin's.  Our family has never made green bean casserole for Thanksgiving.  This year I wanted to make it only in a healthier manner.  So, I did and people liked it!  Instead of canned green beans I used fresh green beans so there was a big difference right there.  Then I used my homemade mushroom soup .  I was going to make homemade onion rings but opted for the easier version of just buying some Funyuns which I'd never had before so I tried them and they were pretty good!  Plus, they were cute, as you can see from the above photo.  I used a tube of the "minis".   For whatever reason, I just didn't feel like the usual Brussel sprouts for Thanksgiving this year so the green bean casserole sounded really good to me.  Now, I think I will make this each Than...

My cooking usually runs pretty simple with not a lot of exotic ingredients but I try to make each dish as tasty as possible.  One of my favorite things to do is to invite guests over for dinner and ask them if they can guess "the secret ingredient" in a dish.  I did this with my peach pie  recipe this past summer when I added the secret ingredient, cayenne pepper.  We served that at two different times with guests here and played that "secret ingredient" game while we enjoyed our dessert.  People are intrigued by it.   It's a fun bit of entertainment while you savour a new dish.   This month, we played it three times when I made my  pumpkin flan  recipe for guests who came over for dinner.  After such a busy month of October with baseball, our November has been very low-key so we decided to get caught up with friends and ended up having four little dinner parties serving a nice, fall meal at each one. I love fall food anyway after barbec...

We harvested our tomatoes the other day and I decided to try this recipe.  I wanted to make it while our guests were here but then we picked blackberries and I decided to use my time to make blackberry bread, crisp and coffee cake. (Our guests were happy about that decision if I judge by how fast it was all  eaten).  So, my tomatoes were piling up.  They gave me a new cookbook as a gift for hosting them and I was eager to try some recipes from it.  I spotted this one immediately.  The cookbook is entitled  Cheers to the Publican, Repast and Present Recipes and Ramblings from an American Beer Hall  by Paul Kahan, Chef Cosmo Goss and Rachel Holtzman.   The Publican is a popular restaurant in Chicago where our guests live.  It's described as a big American beer hall with massive communal tables.  I love those kind of restaurants.  There are lots of stories with the recipes in the book which makes the cookbook fun to read. The stor...

We've been eating this recipe a lot lately because the cauliflower has been looking so good in the stores. Even Trader Joe's, who usually only has pre-packaged produce, had whole, fresh, cauliflower so I grabbed one.  I have a bunch of recipes piled up to post and now that we're snowed in,  I'm getting caught up.  It snowed again last night so here we go again! But I did have to go out today for my morning Pilates class that I usually walk to but the the sidewalks were too slushy so I drove the one mile.  I walk to Pilates 3X/week and walk to  Barre 3  2X/week.  There is a Barre 3 class everyday that I can go to but I usually just go 2X week because I also go to Pilates.  I feel so lucky that I can walk to everything in our neighborhood.  We even started walking to church on Sundays.  The furthest anything is around here is less than two miles.  We really wanted a neighborhood with a high walk score when we moved back to S...

This is a French recipe that I got from the Seattle Times developed by Chef Jim Drohman who worked at Cafe Presse, a very popular Seattle French restaurant.  Cafe Presse was one of Lauren's favorite neighborhood spots and one that we would all go to frequently.  So, needless to say everyone was devastated when it closed (after the pandemic).  Seattle has lots of French restaurants but Cafe Presse was the darling of them all.  Last year, the memory of Cafe Presse came up when Bruce and I went to the Bite of Seattle.   One of our favorite dishes was at a Spanish booth called Maripili where they were making paella to sample.  We had just returned from visiting Spain and we were still into all things Spanish so this turned out to be our favorite of the Bite.   We told them we loved their paella and wanted to come to their restaurant but guess where they were?  In the same spot where Cafe Presse was!  When the cook told me that, I didn't say a wor...

We took our first snorkeling cruise on the Fair Wind forty-three years ago on our honeymoon.  It was my first visit to Hawaii, even though Bruce had visited a dozen times already and he couldn't wait to bring me along.  His parents had a condo here on the Kona Coast of the Big Island of Hawaii so he always had a free place to stay when he came.  He already knew about the Fair Wind snorkeling cruise that takes you to one of the best snorkeling locations on Hawaii's Big Island since 1971.  They take you to a Marine Life Conservation District, the only underwater state park on the Big Island.  There are no roads that lead to it so the only way you can go snorkeling there is to go by boat or by hiking.  Last year, we actually took the hike to get to the bay, called Kealakekua Bay.  It is a 1.8 mile one-way hike with a 2,000 ft elevation, so it was a  bit of a work out coming back up but we could handle it.  Needless to say, there are not a lot of...