Focused at Fifty

Bobalu's Florida Keys One of Mom's favorite restaurants in the Florida Keys was Bobalu's Southern Cafe' on Big Coppitt Key on US Route 1. When she and my stepdad Barry lived in Key West, they would often go there for lunch. It was a favorite restaurant of mine as well when I would visit. I would always get their conch fritters and upon the urging of my Mom, it was the first place I ordered fried green tomatoes. Mom said she loved them and so did I. Bobalu's still exists and has been open for over 20 years. It has changed owners since Mom and Barry lived in the Keys but still has the great carefree Key West atmosphere which has attracted years and years of tourists and locals. Even though this recipe is technically an Amish  one, I still thought of Mom and the Florida Keys while making it. Now I can only surmise that Mom had chosen this recipe so she could make them on her own when she came up North to her home in Lake Wyononah. Well unfortunately she ne...

A summer pic-nic staple is the potato salad. It seems as if everyone's family has their own recipe. As with many of the recipes that I have posted, there are just so many variations out there. My mother's recipe is a family favorite and below, you will see that I have chosen to tweak it to suit my own tastes. I had always wanted to make potato salad and when I started this project, I was pretty excited to discover my Mom's recipe. She made this for our spring and summer pic-nics and barbecues. While preparing the ingredients, I have such a new found respect for my mother and sister Sheryl. It's not that it's hard or difficult, it is just a bit time consuming. And you gotta love a recipe with only four basic commands: boil, chop, mix, chill! In retrospect, it did seem like Mom was making it for hours in our 70's kitchen in my childhood home. Always chopping and mixing and then ordering us kids to get out of the kitchen. Like the previous recipe I posted for...

This is a great article from the April 2015 issue of  The Atlantic entitled "Meet the New Bitch" by writer Britt Peterson about the origins of the word "bitch." I really enjoyed it and wanted to share. It makes you think of how words lose old meanings and gain new ones over time. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/meet-the-new-bitch/386246/ The biggest example that I can think of is the word "awful". This word once referred to the inspiration of awe, fear or wonder. These days, it refers to something so horrible or unpleasant. How it got from one to the other beats me. I didn't get that far. LOL Another word that I remember which once meant something else is the word "myriad." I specifically remember this word from my SAT vocab study courses back in high school. It's a noun meaning a great number but it once meant 10,000 of something, such as a myriad of troops. So the next time you are saying something, realize ...

Colorful Ingredients! This is a great summer pasta salad which my Mom made throughout a good couple of decades of Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day festivities as well as the occasional family BBQ. It is a favorite recipe of my sister Sheryl's, too. It is a "Haynes go-to recipe". Can't decide what to make or bring? Make the shrimp salad recipe! LOL. You really can't go wrong with it. I like it because it is not too heavy and pretty refreshing. For my salad below, I doubled the recipe for a summer cocktail party I had hosted and ended up using a little bit more French dressing than called for but it still came out great. Instead of pimentos, I substituted chopped roasted red peppers. I also substituted an olive oil mayonnaise instead of Miracle Whip. If you want to use the medium canned shrimp or fresh frozen shrimp, you could do that as well. The canned shrimp is used for ease in preparation and it still tastes so good. Lastly, I used ch...

My sis and I do a lot together. Besides my brother Adam, she is my best friend. Back about 4 years ago, Sheryl and I found ourselves in NYC overnight. I was supposed to see friends and then share a hotel room with Sheryl. My plans fell through and I was so upset. My weekend was ruined. Being my big sis, Sheryl made sure the rest of the trip went great. We decided to bring our friend Elsa to a piano bar called the Duplex in the Village to listen to some music. We got there and it was sooo crowded. As luck would have it, two small tables opened up right next to the piano and we snatched them. We had such a great time that night with the singer on the piano turning out songs from the 70's, 80's, and 90's, keeping us entertained with jokes in between. What an incredible evening it was. The singer belted out Chicago's "Saturday in the Park".  I looked at Sheryl and Elsa and we all were singing along to it at the top of our lungs! I remember looking at my sister...

Happy 45th Birthday to myself!! It has been a rough week for various reasons. I wanted to put up a post for my birthday that was whimsical and fun. While going through a box from the attic, I found this paper out that I filled when I was 9 years old waay back in 1979 in ACE class (a creative class run by one of my favorite teachers, Mrs. Elaine Arbo) at Wenonah Elementary School. It was actually titled, "It's Neat to Be Me." You can't make that stuff up! I reference war and world peace a lot which I figured out was due to the Cold War deterioration in the 70's. I still want to be a billionaire but I don't think I'd give all my money away to the poor. I never became a surgeon, sorry Mom (looking up towards Heaven). LOL Some answers are so typically 70's such as the velour shirts that I liked, the TV show "Dallas", and liking disco. Actually I liked disco A LOT but was embarrassed to put it down so I said I liked rock ... and a little disco...

A couple weeks ago, the weekend of Mother's Day, I had to attend the funeral of a beloved fraternity brother from the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, Tim Reeves. I received an email from my other fraternity brother Kent, who informed me that Tim had passed from cancer that Tuesday and services would be held the following Saturday morning.  Best friends Tim and John H. Tim was 46, very private about his medical issue and had kept the gravity of the situation, for the most part, secret. Needless to say the email came as a shock. I had no hesitation when I emailed Kent back that I was rearranging my schedule so that I could make it. There was no question about it. I needed to attend and support Tim's family and my fraternity brothers who were close to him. I had met Tim when I went to Rutgers University. By the time I became a brother, he was no longer at Rutgers but still remained a brother for life coming to our events whenever he could....