A check of the refrigerator revealed half a cucumber, half a sweet onion, half a bell pepper, and a small amount of barley all needing to be used; missing were lettuce, parsley or any other fresh herbs. My kitchen and my garden were in the midst of summer doldrums on a very hot, very un-air-conditioned…

It’s been just about a year since I wrote about pies I had made for one of my grandsons. His cousin turned nine yesterday, and she also requested pie for her birthday. This time it was blueberry, a favorite of many in the family, and perfectly timed with an Aldi special of 99 cents per…

With tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers at their prime either in your backyard garden or at the local Farmers’ Market, now is a great time to make up a batch of gazpacho for a cool lunch or light dinner. Note that I didn’t capitalize “gazpacho.” According to some of the feedback at http://markbittman.com/sunday-supper-gazpachothis term has been…

Time to restart my blog! No sense wasting space to explain why the gap here. Instead I’m back online with sharing some ways to help feed your family well, quickly, inexpensively, and enjoyably. How better to start than with a wonderfully easy raspberry jam recipe. I had mentioned long ago that raspberries were long a…

Yesterday was one of my grandson’s fifth birthday. He had told his mom he would like a pie instead of cake (a typical request in our family) but he couldn’t decide just which kind, so maybe he should just be surprised. Xavier loves fruit, so I knew that we’d go in that direction for a…

We’ve all heard about substituting applesauce for fat in cake recipes, so I went searching for some ideas for an applesauce pumpkin cake. Several sites suggested that cakes made from scratch really don’t work well using this substitution, that it works best with cake mixes. As you may have seen from earlier posts, I like…

It’s that time again, when every gardener supposedly looks for ways to push zucchini on to unsuspecting neighbors, family, and friends, and the table at church yesterday was piled with lots of the ubiquitous squash. Others may not want this bounty, but it’s been good for me, since I have somehow not yet been able…

One of the supermarkets in town had huge heads of cauliflower on special this week for $1.50 each, so I bought several (they keep for weeks in the vegetable drawer). When I got them home, I weighed them, as I often do, just because I’m like that! They weighed in at over 3 1/2 pounds…

Seems like I’m on a dessert binge here, but this is a good finale for warm summer days. We have had several weeks recently with lemons on sale (though you can easily use reconstituted lemon juice in a bottle here for even more savings), and eggs have continued to be quite reasonable this summer.When I…

Two factors came together today for an easy, relatively inexpensive dessert that has been a real hit: first, I had some 99 cents a pound strawberries that needed to be used up quickly and I needed to find a dessert that I could make and finish within an hour and a half. Fortunately I still…