This is another one of those fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants recipes that I came up with when I was (a) desperate for a quick and easy salad dressing and (b) tired of bruising my knuckles trying to get the last of the dijon out of the jar. (Hey, that stuff is spendy and I’m not gonna throw away [...]

The September 2010 Daring Cooks’ challenge was hosted by John of Eat4Fun. John chose to challenge The Daring Cooks to learn about food preservation, mainly in the form of canning and freezing. He challenged everyone to make a recipe and preserve it. John’s source for food preservation information was from The National Center for Home [...]

The August 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n’ Bites and Anula of Anula’s Kitchen. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale. This was a really fun challenge for me, although it definitely drove [...]

[Printable recipe at the bottom of the page!] It’s that time of year again – fresh, green, bright asparagus spears are all over the place. I love asparagus in pretty much any form; steamed, grilled, roasted, baked. But every now and then I want something different and new. Tonight I needed a side dish to [...]

Sunday at the grocery store I saw the most gorgeous artichokes on sale for $1.50 each.  It was all I could do to not buy 10 of them.  Have I mentioned that artichokes are one of my favorite things?  I know some people think they’re too fussy and too much work for too little reward, [...]

I can’t remember where I found this recipe, but it’s been saved in my “keepers” folder for a while.  The original recipe calls for leek and a few other things that I didn’t happen to have around.  So I made a substitution, an addition, and … well … yum! The photograph above doesn’t adequately show [...]

I’ve seen recipes for this sauce everywhere and have always thought I needed to make it, but never got around to it.  I don’t know why really.  Well, tonight I grilled a flank steak and decided that it would be easy and fast to make this Argentine sauce … I started with a fresh bunch [...]

Collard Green Recipe Collard greens are a uniquely Southern food, I think. Most people who aren’t from the South (or haven’t lived here a while) don’t really know what they are, even if they’ve heard of them to begin with. Usually non-Southerners approach collards with suspicion, if not outright fear, visions of some overcooked, slimy [...]