Just getting caught up on some recipes I wanted to save.   Here is a great recipe I got for sloppy joes from a friend.   It's even better than Manwich! Sloppy Joes serves 10-12  2 lb ground beef 1 onion, minced 12 oz. ketchup 6 oz chili sauce 1/4 c. brown sugar 1 T. dry mustard Brown and drain ground beef.   Add onion and saute until soft.   Add remaining ingredients and simmer for 30 mins.  ..read more

  I've barely posted anything this year, but I wanted to remember a few things about my jam making this year.  First of all, the Ferber method of jam making once again didn't work for me.  I am never going to try one of her recipes ever again.   I am going to stick to my tried and true method for making it.   Just for record keeping's sake, 1 flat of strawberries were 24 c halved and hulled berries.     I paid $48 for a flat.   The yield was 18 half pints of strawberry jam.    I haven't made any other jams yet but am freez ..read more

I haven't made sourdough since the pandemic, and even back then, I wasn't particularly good at it.   My friend Alex is a master and he wanted me to test out his sourdough starter method, but I killed my starter after about a month of trying.   So, I just started another one in the typical fashion, where you use water and flour and then throw half of it away everyday and feed it more.  I started it with whole wheat flour and then fed it AP flour. I kept it warm by using a smaller version of one of the cherry pit pads I sell in my etsy shop by heating it up for 2 mi ..read more

  my hubby's 58th birthday cake Since I am going to become a grandma this year, I figure I need to level up my cake making game.   It's just that unless you are serving 12 people, a layer cake is just way too much for us.  After reading a blog post on Sally's Baking Addiction about making 6" cakes,  I determined this might be the solution to the problem.    I needed to invest in a trio of 6" baking pans, so I followed Sally's suggestion of the Fat Daddio brand, and I tried to buy them locally at Swift's Hardware, which has an excellent cooking secti ..read more

  We had a baby shower for my daughter in law Olivia yesterday.   My first grandbaby!  The food was delicious, many of the ladies brought yummy food to pass.  I made some mini cheese balls (shown above) from my favorite cheeseball recipe formed in half inch balls that  I rolled in ground pecans.   This is so much more convenient than a whole cheeseball for a large crowd.  I made a great recipe for Mediterranean Turkey Pinwheels I found on the interwebs that was delicious and easy.   I made them a day ahead and wrapped them in w ..read more

  I know, they don't look like much.   But a couple years ago, I won a gift basket in a raffle and it included something called "Monster Cookies" and they were so delicious, I had to figure out how to make them. At the time, I was regularly baking for an assortment of carpenters, plumbers and electricians that were working on my house, so I was always looking for something new to try.   I made a batch of these and presented them to the 2 young electricians that were installing the ceiling fan in my craft room.   One of them said "I can't have them, I'm glu ..read more

  Since I have moved to the Keweenaw, I have really missed some great produce you just can't get up here.   For example, there really isn't local cantaloupe and watermelon.  I had to buy canning peaches when I was downstate in Traverse City last weekend.   And the sweet corn at the farmer's market has been a big disappointment.    I did find some great sweet corn for sale at the gas station at the Indian reservation in Baraga from Johnson Farms.  I bought a dozen ears and we ate some, and I made corn relish with the rest.  It was 92 degrees t ..read more

This year, I entered many contests at the Houghton County Fair.  It was a lot of fun to do!   I entered 21 things and won 7 blue ribbons: food preparation: English muffin (only entry so that was an easy win!), food preservation: Dill Pickles, Salsa and Floriculture: dahlia (only one entered), succulent, dracaena, terrarium.  I had never made English muffins before, and I have to say they were kind of a pain to make, but they came out so good.  I probably will make them again, so I want to remember how I did it.  I found a recipe on the King Arthur website, bu ..read more

  This past week, Andy and I finally visited Isle Royale after all these years of wanting to get there.  When we were in college, we had plenty of time to do it, but no money.  After we graduated, we had the funds but were short on time.   Now that we are retired, we were finally able to do it! Getting there: Isle Royale is the least visited national park, and rightly so.   It's difficult to get there!  You can get there by seaplane or boat from the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan or Grand Marais, Minnesota.  None are cheap!  We took the seapl ..read more

The Dearborn Store I got a little nostalgic about Jacobson's the other day.   When I was a new engineer at Ford and working and living in Dearborn, my hair salon was in the Dearborn store right on Michigan Ave.   They had a restaurant there called "Top of the Fountain" where ladies would lunch.   West Dearborn was a very preppy affluent area and we had all sorts of fancy shopping, including a Pendleton store and Crowley's and, of course, Jake's, as we used to call it.   I got a book out of the library about it's history, and it included several recipe ..read more