Focused at Fifty

Tomato sauce splatters included.  Sunday, August 24th, would have been my Mom's 72nd birthday.  The birthday of a loved one is always a tough day to get through. I went through her recipes and chose two to consider making in her honor:  homemade meatballs or chicken parmigiana. I left it up to John and he chose the chicken. It is a good recipe, easy to do for a "school night."  In addition, it's also one that I have not made before. Mom used to make this for us when we would visit her and my stepdad Barry at their home in Lake Wynonah. The breaded chicken, topped with a rich tomato sauce and tons of mozzarella cheese just filled you up. She paired it with a simple garden salad and garlic bread.  There was seldom room for dessert. I copied the recipe down below as she wrote it. I did make a couple changes. The first being that I wasn't sure if she used a "pound of chicken breasts" or she wanted me to POUND the chicken breasts. Since the meal was ...

I was going to write about something else tonight but thought about an encounter with my neighbor Charlotte a couple month's back and decided to write about that instead.  Since I haven't written about her in a while I decided it was time for a Charlotte story. I love my neighbor Charlotte, she is a free wheeling tough as nails pint sized 70 something divorcee. Picture Source That evening, John and I were going to grill some homemade Italian sausage from Russo's Market in Wyomissing, PA. If you haven't tried it, it is so good that let's just say it saves us Philly transplants when we need our Italian! It is just as good as anything from the Italian Market, but without the local smells and colorful street urchins. ;) Anyway, I was hollering into the house from the deck for John to bring out the veggies to grill them up. "John!!! Bring out the peppers and onions! I need to get them on the grill!" OK, I was kind of like screaming. It had been a lo...

First, some interesting history about meatloaf from the website Wikipedia: "American meatloaf has its origins in scrapple, a mixture of ground pork and cornmeal served by German-Americans in Pennsylvania since Colonial Times.  However, meatloaf in the contemporary American sense did not appear in cookbooks until the late 19th century."     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meatloaf "In 2007, meatloaf was voted the seventh-favorite dish in the United States according to Good Housekeeping.   During the Great Depression cooking meatloaf was a way to stretch the food budget for families, using an inexpensive type of meat and other ingredients as leftovers; along with spices, it was popular to add cereal grains to the meatloaf to stretch the meat. The tradition lives on with the merits of producing a lower-fat dish with superior binding and consistency.The meatloaf is typically eaten with some kind of sauce or relish."   http://en.w...

Hummingbird feeder and the rabbit. (A little blurry due to screen window) Last week was an incredibly stressful work week. I'm not going into detail but it was a doozy. I don't want to alienate anyone so I will keep mum.  I have an incredible view out my kitchen window across my yard; First, the middle aged oak tree with all the bird feeders, then onto the long rectangular shaped flower garden in the middle and finally ending at the other side of the yard at our fire-pit. I will often come home and make myself an after-work cocktail and just gaze out at the yard, either from the kitchen window or relax out on the deck. I love my yard. This particular day, I leaned up against the kitchen sink counter and spied our "yard" rabbit out by the middle flower bed. Looking towards the house with the middle flower bed on the left side of the picture. He was munching away for a good five minutes on clover, irises, alfalfa, various grasses, lily of the valley, and ...