How-To: Pizza Sauce

I love this no-cook pizza sauce. It's easy, garlicky and tastes so good on pizza or used as a dipping sauce for stromboli.

The recipe calls for canned diced tomatoes, but I'm sure you could use fresh too.

Jello Cake

Usually I try to stick with recipes that use real ingredients. I am not opposed to using butter and sugar and cream, but I try to avoid processed, convenience food.

Except for sometimes. Like when it's really hot in the summer and all I can think of is taking a bite of cool, refreshing jello cake. Jello cake is not real. Cake mix. Jello packets. And cool-whip. Fake, fake, fake. But yummy, and surely okay two or three times a summer.

How-To: Pizza Dough

Is it just me or is delivery pizza costing a lot these days? I think our last pizza pie cost something like $17. The convenience is so nice some nights, but I always feel guilty knowing that I can make my own for less than $4. 

And it tastes so yummy. Every time I make my own, I swear I won't buy delivery again.

Chocolate "Declare"

Summertime is the season of vacation. And vacation with family is always the best. Hellos and warm hugs that have waited all year to be given, piles of cousins getting to know one another again, warm sun and cool water, laughter in the kitchen and around the table. 

Baked Ziti

Ziti is one of my favorite company meals. It can be made ahead, it's satisfying and almost everyone likes it, especially children. And this recipe is so good. It's not a dump-everything-in-and-bake kinda dish, but the few extra steps reward you with tender noodles, punctuated by cheesy goodness and a bright, tomato sauce. 

Sweet and Sour Meatballs

I love old family photos. The black and white kind. My parents and grandparents as they used to be.  Young children, chubby cheeked and precocious, with large silk bows perched atop their curls or looking uncomfortable in knickers and buttoned-up shirt. Or maybe as young adults, flashing beautiful, carefree smiles, dressed in the classiest of dresses or looking handsome in uniform. Little moments, captured at a time when all of life was before them. 

How-To: Knead Dough

Kneading bread dough is something that causes many new bakers to blanch and turn quickly to a different recipe. It seems daunting and difficult, something that died out with our great-grandmothers.

But kneading is so fun! Remember when you were a kid and you used to sit at your mom's kitchen table and make all sorts of fun fake foods out of Play-Doh? Kneading gives you the chance, as an adult, to get your hands into a lump of dough and transform it into something beautiful. Kneading can seem intimidating and scary, and there are some guidelines to follow, but really what you're doing is playing with dough!

Pudding Drop Cookies

There's nothing like getting a package in the mail. 

Particularly when you are a starving-for-good-food college student. And particularly when you see your mother's name as the return sender. 

Grammy's White Bread

My Grammy turned 93 on Wednesday. 93 years. Most of them spent tending gardens, pickling produce, planning suppers and baking bread. In a house built by a young husband for his young wife many years ago. 

On the breezeway, the mid-afternoon sun warms the row of freshly picked cucumbers, still glistening from their bath with the garden hose. Two steps up into the porch where piles of shoes, a bucket of clothespins and hung up coats all have their place. An assortment of pies, strawberry, pecan and chocolate, placed precariously on the washer and dryer, catch your eye as you pass through. A curtained door leads into a faded kitchen, alive with the bustle of getting supper on and the smell of homemade food.

Rice Pudding

My son was sick last week. The really sad kind of sick where he just hung in my arms, forehead hot with fever and cheek squished against my shoulder, snoring softly through his open mouth. The kind of sick where nothing gets done and its perfectly ok because the little one needs his mommy more than a clean house and a gourmet supper.