Discover the Secrets of Good health

Every year about this time, I’m invited to pick Bing cherries at our next door neighbor Pat’s yard. Pat picks all she can freeze and eat for the year, and anything left is for friends or the birds. There is something truly glorious about standing in the shade of a cherry tree ripe [...]

Recently I hosted several Sacramento area food bloggers over for a potluck. Late in the afternoon, after most of the guests had left and the die hards remained, I pulled out some nocino, a spicy, sweet, slightly bitter walnut liqueur that I made a couple years ago to share with the group. The [...]

What a heat wave we are having on the coasts! Here’s a curried chicken salad from the archives that cooks up quickly on the stove-top and then is chilled. Spicy but cool. ~Elise
I love this curry chicken salad. I made up this recipe 20 years ago after a friend of mine gave [...]

There are two basic methods to test for how done your meat is while you are cooking it - use a meat thermometer, or press on the meat with your finger tips. The problem with the meat thermometer approach is that when you poke a hole into the meat with a thermometer, it can [...]

Come late May and early June, my mother’s boysenberry vine comes alive with fruit. Boysenberries look like blackberries, but are actually a cross between blackberries, loganberries, and raspberries. As such they fruit much earlier in the season than blackberries, and they are more delicate in touch and taste. As a vine to [...]

After several years of observing the results of my feeble gardening attempts, my next door neighbor Pat (76 and still going strong) graciously responded to my pleas for help and has been guiding me this spring with soil amendments, starter plants, seeds, and all around gardening advice. As a result, here it is early June [...]

This flourless chocolate cake by Garrett is to-die-for. Almost like fudge. ~Elise
For a recent potluck for all the Sacramento food bloggers I decided to throw together this intensely decadent and very easy chocolate torte. The original recipe is based around David Lebovitz’s Chocolate Idiot Cake, however, this one bakes up much more quickly, uses [...]

I was told by my friends, “whatever you do, don’t call it a rhubarb anything, or no one will want to make it.” Ever since Garrett gave me some of his rhubarb rosemary jelly a few weeks ago, I’ve been experimenting with rhubarb and rosemary. The combination really is outrageously good, though sadly, I [...]

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Picadillo is a spicy Latin American meat dish often served as a stuffing in chilies, taco filling, or served with rice. I nabbed this recipe from my friend Heidi H’s recipe collection one day because it looked intriguing. What a keeper! Lots of flavor and in the time it takes you to cook [...]

Strawberry and rhubarb has to be one of the world’s best pairings. We love the way tart rhubarb (ever try to eat raw rhubarb?) dances with sweet strawberries in cobblers and pies. In this terrine, orange zest makes an appearance as well. I made this on a whim a week ago to [...]