Discover the Secrets of Good health

My mother grew up in a house where there was constant entertaining. My nana was somewhat of a social bee and even I remember how every night was a party night when as a child I came to visit during the summer. Mom and dad were reminiscing the other day about one of [...]

One of our favorite ways to eat green beans is with salsa. The tomatoes, onions, chiles, spices, and vinegar perk up the beans in the most wonderful way. This bean salad recipe is sort of a riff on the salsa theme, taking it up a notch with pickled jalapeños, cilantro, cotija cheese, and [...]

Flank steak is a lean, flavorful cut of meat that is probably best prepared marinated and cooked over a grill. But sometimes you just don’t have time to marinate the meat or deal with the grill. My mother raised 6 kids (all born within 8 years) on my dad’s teacher’s salary. (Her [...]

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 [...]