Engaging stories of love, joy, comfort and friendship with proven scrumptious, healthy recipes, we celebrate LOVE as the secret ingredient for wonderful food!

This is what you get!

October 7, 2012 by Mary Frances 6 Comments

I received this photo via email yesterday from my 24-year old son who is in graduate school.

Doesn’t this just look scrumptious?

This is what you get when you raise your kids on great homemade food made with love. They want, of course, to keep eating great food, sharing the whole experience and recreating the love part. So when you make and share love-filled food, it all comes back to you tenfold.

So the backstory, which I found out today, is; he saw this recipe somewhere and thought it would be great, so he shared it with his girlfriend some months ago. She is there for the weekend, kept the recipe in mind and surprised him with this dish when he came home from Russian class on Friday morning. Sweet!

So I don’t have the complete recipe, but here are the broad stokes. Combine a half of an avocado, (minus the pit of course) one raw egg and grated provolone cheese as you see in the picture. Bake at 425 degrees for 15 – 20 minutes, depending on how done you like your eggs. Maybe 10 or 12 minutes is enough if you like your yolks runny, as I do. Zach said that both of these eggs that you’re looking at are really well done, although you might think otherwise from the picture.

He said it was so creamy and delicious, just yummy. And it’s unusual to bake an avocado!

A September Sunday morning

September 9, 2012 by Mary Frances 4 Comments

After the huge storm last night, including tornadoes in Long Island and parts of Connecticut, we awoke in the country to a most spectacular day today! Blue sky, billowy clouds, and a downed, huge, heavy tree branch that just missed one of our cars were the first things we saw this morning. Yikes!
This was our breakfast, an absolute favorite of mine. Smoked salmon, Ben’s homemade cream cheese, tomatoes from the garden, thinly sliced red onion, capers and toasted bagels. We finished it off with a fruit salad of black mission figs, mango, red grapes and banana. Can’t beat that!

Although there is nothing here that I made, except for putting together the fruit salad, I just had to share it with you because it was all so pretty in the dazzling sunlight this morning.

See the view from our dining room window below. Hope you had a great weekend!

What constitutes a vacation?

July 14, 2012 by Mary Frances 9 Comments

Doing something different? Removing your mind from everyday things? Being with your children 24/7? Having the freedom to do what you want when you want – such as staying in bed, reading or sleeping on and off until 10, or napping at 4 or having a beer at lunch?

You know what makes it for you. For us, last week was a first of being at our little upstate home, with glorious weather all week except for rain one day, no kids, no conventions or meetings and just doing what we felt like, when we felt like, and having some close friends over for dinner on the 4^th. It was really perfect. We had sunset cocktails, wonderful local food, tried new recipes, dinner out twice (a treat), and lovely walks after dinner. You know, you feel like you eat too much and you drink too much and you’re bound to gain weight but surprisingly, I didn’t. I did ride my bike from 8 to 21.5 miles almost every day so I guess that helped and worked to sweat the toxins out as well. It is so quiet there and I love having all the windows in the house open to feel the clean soft breezes. (Rare for me because in NYC, it just makes the apartment dirty.) It was a real, clear the head, simply lovely time. We saw two great movies – The Avengers (silly fun) and Moonrise Kingdom – a quirky, must see, coming of age movie with great music and fantastic graphic scenes of Rhode Island.

I hope you get to clear your head this summer as well.

Here are some visual highlights.

Driveway with bike in upstate New York. Road to heaven.

I always think this looks like the road to heaven or the road to nowhere. There actually is a large house way over to the right and this is their driveway.

Our neighborhood waterfall.

The corn is growing!

Yellow roadside flowers in upstate New York.

I love these little yellow roadside flowers.

Horse farm in upstate New York with tractor.

Local horse farm – see the tractor?

Breakfast outside with eggs, toast, and orange juice.

Breakfast outside – my favorite!

Mother’s Day!

May 15, 2012 by Mary Frances Leave a Comment

It is my all-time favorite holiday. I get to feel like a queen and do whatever I want for the day and my boys and husband are just the BEST!

This past Sunday I woke up to a dining room table set for four, which meant that my oldest son was even joining us for brunch! The younger one made fabulous waffles from scratch, with maple syrup from upstate New York, thanks to our friend Mary Beth who was just over for dinner and brought it as a gift! The meal was complete with artisanal sausage and tea.

And now dinner was amazing. They had asked me what I wanted and I said, “Surprise me!”

They started with a baby arugula salad with roasted beets, toasted walnuts and English Stilton. Yum! The main course was swordfish steaks, stuffed with a parsley, anchovy, caper, pesto sauce and topped with it too (a Mark Bittman recipe) and a quinoa vegetable dish that the younger one made up and promises to share. Dessert was vanilla ice cream with sauteed figs in butter with a vanilla bean, plus my husband supplied some fantastic chocolate truffles. But the boys did everything! I could truly taste the LOVE – everything was scrumptious! I am very lucky.

And then dessert was followed by gifts! A totally fantastic day!

Baby arugula, roasted beets, toasted walnuts and English Stilton

Broiled swordfish with parsley pesto and quinoa with sauteed vegetables

Ice cream and sauteed figs in a white bowl.

Ice cream with sauteed figs

Can’t you just smell the chocolate?!!

We must know what we’re eating!

February 27, 2012 by Mary Frances Leave a Comment

This is from an email I just received from the Center for Food Safety.

Congress to FDA: LABEL GENETICALLY ENGINEERED FOOD
Have YOUR Senators and Representative Joined the Letter?

In the U.S., we pride ourselves on having choices and making informed decisions. Under current FDA regulations, we don’t have that choice when it comes to GE ingredients in the foods we purchase and feed our families. This led the Center for Food Safety to submit a legal petition to the FDA demanding that the agency require the labeling of GE foods. In response, Senator Barbara Boxer (CA) and Representative Peter DeFazio (OR) have authored a bicameral Congressional letter in support of our legal petition and will be urging their fellow Members on Capitol Hill to sign onto their letter.

Unsuspecting consumers by the tens of millions are being allowed to purchase and consume unlabeled genetically engineered foods, despite the fact that FDA undertakes no testing of its own, instead relying only on a voluntary consultation with industry and confidential industry data to assure safety. Internal FDA documents discovered in prior CFS litigation actually indicated the foods could pose serious risks, but those views were overruled.

Genetically engineered foods are required to be labeled in nearly 50 countries around the world including the United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, China, New Zealand and many others. A recent poll released by ABC News found that 93 percent of the American public wants the federal government to require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods. As ABC News stated, “Such near-unanimity in public opinion is rare.” Yet the United States is one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t require labeling of GE food!

Please write and call your U.S. Senators and Representative and urge them to join the Boxer-DeFazio letter in support of labeling!

Happy Sunday!

January 29, 2012 by Mary Frances 2 Comments

Okay, so I made these waffles this morning (my husband was pining for them) and they look pretty good – but didn’t taste great. So I won’t share the recipe with you. I don’t know what was wrong but let me work on this recipe before I give it to you. One thing they suggested was to do this sweetened sour cream – with brown sugar and ginger with sweetened strawberries AND the maple syrup. Well I think that would have put me in a sugar coma …. and I didn’t have strawberries. But I did have blueberries and I did have the buttermilk for the batter and I did have the sour cream. I always feel so cool when I find a new recipe I want to make and I actually have most of the ingredients!

Back to the sugar – so for this, I just put a dollop of plain sour cream with some slightly sweetened blueberries and it was really really good as a topping. Now I just need to work on that base waffle!