My mum and I are mincemeat pie lovers. Just a thin slice is the perfect dessert, or breakfast, at Christmas time. You can buy mincemeat in the jar, but it’s not that difficult to make your own. Traditional mincemeat pies are made with beef or venison and suet. Suet is the fat found around the …
I love baking with cranberries and apples in the fall and winter. I found this Ina Garten (aka The Barefoot Contessa) recipe from her cookbook, How Easy Is That?, on the Serious Eats website. Ina calls it “Easy Cranberry Apple Cake,” and it lives up to the “easy” part of that title. I grew up …
No baking skills required for this easy peanut butter tart recipe — all the magic happens in the freezer. ~~~ This peanut butter tart was dessert the night I made slow cooker jambalaya. Since I hadn’t seen Jim in over a week, I wanted Tuesday night dinner to be a little more special than usual, …
Carolina peaches, mm mm good. I still have memories of a peach shake I had years ago, maybe decades ago, during a beach stay in the Outer Banks. Every summer we stay a week at Ocean Isle Beach in the southern part of North Carolina. I like to bake when I’m at the beach. Maybe …
Are you like me? Do you have file folders full of recipe clippings from newspapers and magazines? For decades I’ve been thinking about organizing them but it hasn’t happened yet. I know there are treasures in there. One stained newspaper clipping from the Washington Post is titled Blueberry Bonanza. The Post has always had an excellent …
Corn on the cob season is here! My guy was making ribs so I thought corn salad would be the perfect accompaniment to them. I have a corn salad recipe somewhere but since I couldn’t put my hands on it I took a look at some online recipes and relied on my memory to make …
It’s strawberry season in North Carolina. I found a farm stand close to my house – Porter Farms in Willow Spring on Hwy 42. They have all sizes of containers for sale, and it’s even cheaper if you pick your own. That night we had (store-bought) angel food cake with strawberries and whipped cream on …
Today it’s all about sexting, gingerbread, Tarantino clapper, abbatoir and beer. Everyone in a relationship should read this one about sexting, yes, sexting. Don’t be a prude, let your honey know that you’re thinking about him (or her), you don’t need to get explicit. I first met Natasha Crawford at Ignite Raleigh. She was a …
Grabbing the Gusto 