I know a lot of people despise making pies, but I’ve grown to really enjoy it. This year, I made a total of six pies for Thanksgiving to share with my family and Joey’s throughout the weekend. I normally try making something new every year along with the old favorites, because I like experimenting. My brother-in-law was the catalyst for […]

Every once in awhile, my sister and I would be allowed to choose a candy bar of our choice from the convenience store. It was an agonizing choice—trying to figure out how to get the biggest bar within the set budget. I normally landed on Rolos or a Caramello, because I could get each one to last quite awhile. If […]

I think I was only vaguely aware of what a cranberry was when I was a kid. Craisins were introduced when I was about 10, so I was firmly entrenched in loving just raisins by then, and while I think I’d tried the cranberry sauce that comes in a can and is sliced up for Thanksgiving dinner, I’m not sure […]

When I taught public speaking, one of the sample speech videos I often showed my students before we began work on demonstration speeches was of a young man showing how to make an avocado salsa. I watched that video more times than I can count, and while I’ve never made his recipe, I did learn from that sample speech how […]

Full disclosure: I royally screwed up this week’s recipe, but it did still taste wonderful, so I’m sharing it with you anyway. I made a few missteps on this recipe. One was definitely my fault. The other was lack of direction on behalf of the original author, who is obviously more skilled than I. The one that was my fault […]

Full disclosure: I royally screwed up this week’s recipe, but it did still taste wonderful, so I’m sharing it with you anyway. I made a few missteps on this recipe. One was definitely my fault. The other was lack of direction on behalf of the original author, who is obviously more skilled than I. The one that was my fault […]

There they were on my kitchen countertop: the final remnants of two friends’ summer garden efforts, a line of tomatoes and sweet peppers, all staring at me, begging to be made into something delicious. So I searched “tomato and pepper recipes” online, scrolled through the results and felt completely uninspired. Nothing seemed to appeal to my current mood, and I […]

Tzatziki (pronounced zat-zickee) was not a term in my vocabulary until recently. I was scrolling through Pinterest, as I tend to do in my moments of spare time, and I stumbled on a picture of something that looked delicious. It was a recipe for Greek turkey meatball gyros (pronounced yee-rows) with tzatziki sauce. I’ve heard of gyros, but tzatziki was […]

Afew weeks ago, after a spirited debate about tater tot casserole, I realized that people have a lot of very strong opinions about how tater tots should be served. Something I didn’t realize is that the tater tot is actually a fairly recent creation; it was invented in 1953 by Nephi Grigg of the Ore-Ida Company. They were making frozen […]

I have to admit, I kind of went off the rails this week. Just stay with me on this one, but I decided to try a flavor combination I’ve only had while snacking or attending a barbecue—except this time it was in cupcake form. Sometimes I find myself going down a Pinterest rabbit hole and find all kinds of strange […]