Don’t laugh at this really long name for today’s cake. I often end up with a few bananas at the end of the bunch that get too soft to eat, and applesauce and peanut butter are staples in my pantry, so the ingredients are all right here for a relatively healthy dessert. Another advantage? If…

Why mess with success? That was the initial comment from a friend when I shared my testing of some snickerdoodle variations. Then, she tasted the “experiments.” Ah, that’s why. New taste sensations are always good for variety. Yes, snickerdoodles may be a favorite cookie for just about any sweets lover, but how can you grow…

If you are a gardener, you probably know that most greens grow best in cool weather. Why, then, does it seem as though these wonderful vegetables have long been most prevalent on the tables of Southerners? Growing up in the upper Midwest, we mostly knew of spinach from Popeye –and it would take more than…

The green beans in my garden got off to a late start, but now that September has arrived, they are producing beautifully. One of our family’s favorite ways to eat green beans is roasting in the oven, but the same results can easily be obtained by grilling and, I have discovered, by using my old…

After a slow start, my little garden is producing a good crop of tomatoes each day. I planted 6 varieties, including an heirloom plum type tomato (currently sprawling across a large part of the raspberries, even though I continuously tie these back to their stakes), a single grape tomato plant, and both yellow and red…

I have been making “quick” coffeecakes for decades, starting with two basic recipes from the 1962 Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. One was titled simply “Coffeecake” while the other was “Blueberry Buckle.” Over the years I have layered these with many kinds of fruit, have changed the toppings, have upped the nutrition with the use…

This is a recipe that uses a lot of raspberries, frugal enough if you have them free for the picking in the back yard or relatively inexpensively at a pick-your-own farm, but, yes I know, an extravagance for anyone having to buy them in the store. So you may need to decide if they will…

It’s raspberry season again, time for me to find new ways to use the ever abundant crop of backyard berries. This week I had some bananas to use up as well, so it was time to try  raspberry banana combination. This recipe stretches a couple of packages of raspberries into a lot of servings, in…

For a blog that proposes to present recipes that are economical and relatively quick/easy to prepare, sharing recipes for raspberries probably seems incongruous for many. I know that I have rarely bought fresh raspberries because of the very high cost, and even frozen ones were rarely, if ever, something that a budget-conscious shopper might buy….

Now that our local Costco is carrying tofu at a very reasonable price, I have been experimenting with it in more dishes. One success has been using tofu as a substitute for eggs in things like breakfast burritos, but my early attempts at adding cubes of it to stir fries were not as good as…