Focused at Fifty

 Very exciting stuff, chopping green onions!    After I received a comment from someone on the 'basic nature' of the recipes I was posting, I felt I needed to reiterate the purpose of my project. I will have recipes for meatloaf, baked chicken, zucchini bread, cookies, and veggie dip among others. These are home-style family recipes which many of you already have. I just have never made them and want to be able to say in a years' time that I have accomplished that. You can doctor them up as you wish and some of them I have and will note it when I do. This blog project is not about making gourmet foods (although I reserve the right to venture down that path in the future.) These are not cooking channel glossy magazine recipes. It is not about me cooking or rather stumbling through some famous chef's cookbook. This project is about cooking through my own families' recipes. Most are my Mom's, but some are my Nana's, sister's, cousin's, a

My sis Sheryl and I ventured out to North Jersey (as we call it out here) over the weekend to spend time with our dear cousins, sisters Anne and Jennifer. We reconnected a couple years ago after a long absence. It is a funny thing when you get older, you realize that those cousins you hung with in your childhood years are almost the only family left and hopefully ... and if you are lucky, you reconnect with them or stay connected with them. If getting older has taught me anything, this is not always the case with friends and families. I live in a very special world where I am very lucky that my family loves each other and loves getting together. I know of plenty of dear friends which this does not happen. It is sad but something that I have come to accept. I cannot impress the close relationships of my family on others. Some families, unfortunately, will just not be that close. As an adult, I have come to accept that I cannot influence my friends in that regard. I look on it with sad

This is my Nana's recipe for sweet noodle kugel. I posted about this once before but never posted the recipe. Kugel is a holiday mainstay in Jewish culture and cooking. I remember having this on Rosh Hoshana, Hannukah, and Passover. It is fitting that I am putting this recipe up during the holiest of holidays periods, the 10 High Holy days between Passover and Yom Kippur. Kugel can be made in variety of ways:  apple sauce kugel, potato kugel, noodle kugel, matzoh kugel, savory spinach kugel, carrot kugel, and of course, my Nana's recipe below for the sweet noodle kugel with raisins. I love this recipe as I have eaten it as a side dish, dessert, or even a quick breakfast on the run.  My sister Sheryl makes a great spinach kug. I remember my brother Adam and I loving this recipe below when Nana and Mom made it in the 70's. We would fight for the pieces which had the most crunchy noodles on top. I made the recipe this evening. You could smell the apples, nutmeg, and cinnam

Nana, Mom, and Sheryl As a child, I hated all types of fish except those that were battered, breaded, deep fried and covered in ketchup. Give me fish sticks till the end of the earth! I also loved those Gorton's beer battered cod fillets. They were so good with ketchup, LOTS of ketchup. As far as I was concerned, that is how they came out of the ocean, already slathered in ketchup.   We used to go to a restaurant in Mullica Hill, NJ, by the name of the Hilltop Restaurant. It was a small diner/café type place. Mom would drag us around town antiquing till she was ready to drop. We hated it but were rewarded with lunch and I had my FAVORITE meal, fried clam strips with lots of ketchup.   Growing up, I was never a fan of just baked or broiled fish. That is until my Mom made this recipe. I ate it cautiously at first. The 2 nd mouthful was even better. It wasn't until years later that I found that this was actually one of my Nana's recipes and the family history-bu