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

Delicious Sunday Morning Breakfast Sausage Patties

January 30, 2016 by Mary 15 Comments

We always enjoy a big breakfast on Sunday mornings. It’s nice to take the time to make a bountiful and beautiful one to linger over as a special treat. I am spoiled in that my husband always makes me breakfast during the week. As I‘m sure you probably do, we start our workdays eating breakfast in a rush, eager to get the day going. He serves me mine to eat while I’m putting on make-up and blow drying my hair. I take a bite and chew, hairbrush in hand, multi-tasking to try to save some time.

So this is all the more reason we truly enjoy our Sunday mornings! I know I’ve published my sausage recipe before but this one is a little different with the added shiitake mushroom. I LOVE mushrooms! My husband, not so much. However, I snuck this one in and he LOVED it!

One shiitake mushroom and multiple mushrooms behind it.

Use just one very large shiitake mushroom.

Chopped up shiitake mushroom on a wooden board.

One large mushroom chops up into a lot!

The mushroom did not add a deep mushroom-y flavor, but it did add a wonderful lightness that really made these Delicious Sunday Morning Breakfast Sausage Patties good enough to record, share and make again.

I hope you’ll try these – and remember it’s always better to know what is in the food you’re eating as opposed to buying store made sausage. That is why I do not mind taking the time to make these on a Sunday morning. They actually come together, very quickly and easily – takes about 20 minutes and then time to grill or sauté in a skillet.

You should also know that these reheat beautifully in the microwave for 30 seconds for that quick weekday breakfast. So leftovers are not a problem!

DELICIOUS SUNDAY MORNING BREAKFAST SAUSAGE PATTIES – serves 6, makes 14 patties

1 lb. ground pork
1 small egg
¼ cup of panko
1 Tbs. grainy mustard
¾ tsp. herbs de Provence
1 large shiitake mushroom, stem trimmed at bottom & stem and cap finely chopped
¼ cup finely chopped red onion or shallot
2 – 3 sprigs of Italian parsley finely chopped
Sprinkling of salt
Black pepper – 20 grinds

Combine everything together with your hands. Mix thoroughly, but lightly. Do not overmix.

Shape into 12 – 14 small patties.

Spray grill pan or sauté pan with a very light coating of canola or vegetable oil. Cook patties on high heat, turning once, for a total of about 7 minutes.

Serve with scrambled eggs, toast, fruit salad, coffee and LOVE!

What is it??

October 10, 2012 by Mary Frances 4 Comments

Our wonderful friend, Carl, presented this gift to us at lunch last week. He was so excited! He was recently visiting Berlin and saw a kitchen shop there near the train station and knew he had to run in and see if he could find this for us.

Steve and I looked at one another. We were perplexed.

Certainly for him to think of us while he was vacationing in the Eastern Block was so generous of him but what the hell was this thing? And Carl was oh so very careful in taking it out of the bag and setting it on the table.

At our lunch together the last time, we had this big discussion on eggs! The variety of ways to cook them, how wonderful creamy and dreamy local farm fresh eggs taste these days and how not to have them crack when making hard or soft boiled eggs.

Well, this is an egg piercer!

When you unlock it by twisting it, a needle pops up. You place the raw egg on this baby and pierce a hole, to prevent it from cracking when boiling it.

Isn’t that cool?

I suppose, if you’re really a Martha Stewart or Sandra Lee, around Easter time, you could pierce both ends and blow out the eggs and paint and enamel them for eternity, or make Christmas ornaments, or whatever. Now I see people even hanging painted and colored eggs from trees at Easter!

So, my husband, Steve, makes breakfast for both of us during the week. I only do it on weekends. (Yes he is a sweetie.) So this is his tool. I think he’s getting used to it. He’s only broken one egg.

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!

A very special day.

November 27, 2011 by Mary Frances Leave a Comment

Yesterday was my birthday and as has become a tradition from my husband and sons, I am to stay out of the kitchen the whole day and only do what I want. Pretty special! So I slept late, went for long bike ride, chatted with an old friend (actually my second employee who never forgets my birthday after all these years) from San Francisco and then some of us went to the movies to see J. Edgar.

Zach and his Polish girlfriend, Agata, made breakfast and lunch, while my husband and my eldest son made dinner. Breakfast and lunch were surprises to me while the dinner menu was my request. All were amazing!!

Homemade Polish bread on a wooden cutting board.

Polish homemade bread

We have a bread recipe in our family from my grandmother that I usually make on each holiday. Since we were all spending Thanksgiving at my brother, Steve’s house in CT, Agata volunteered to make the bread. Yipee!! This is a yeast number with 2 risings and takes about 6 hours. So it was a treat to have someone else offer to make it! The most interesting thing is that her family has a really similar recipe to ours and she made a few modifications to match ours exactly, as she had tasted my bread last Christmas. Nowhere else have we ever run into this! Most people think of babka or some form of that when you say Polish bread but this is a slightly cakey, eggy version and she said we do it a little sweeter than her family.

Polish vegetable and cheese salad in a blue and white bowl.

Polish vegetable/cheese salad

She did a beautiful job!! See the photo – light, airy and just the right texture. So for breakfast she made us all a breakfast her grandmother used to make for her! Egg salad (with Tom and Ethel’s delicious farm fresh eggs) and another dish that is a mixture of fresh peeled cucumbers, Farmer’s cheese, creme fraiche, tomatoes, garlic and chives. For each bite, we put a spoonful of either one on a piece of toasted homemade bread, and it was yummy! Creamy, light, refreshing and different! All things I LOVE!

Creamy egg salad

Right after breakfast, Agata got to work on lunch. From scratch, she made nearly 70 pierogis! They were delicious. They were stuffed with a mixture of sautéed onion, mashed potatoes and Farmers cheese and then topped with a light sauce of onions and bacon. Served with a chilled glass of Sauvignon Blanc and we were all happy campers!! Just delicious!

A pierogi lunch!

So for dinner, our oldest son made me a terrific Rob Roy straight up. It is one of my favorite cocktails, right up there with a Tanqueray 10 straight up martini. A Rob Roy is essentially a slightly sweet Manhattan made with either Scotch or better yet, choose a single malt, like Oban. Add a lemon twist and I am set!

This drink, besides being delicious, always brings back fond memories of the first time I had it. It was at the Windows on the World restaurant at a special event for World Trade Club Members. This was the storied restaurant on top of the World Trade Center. We were doing marketing work for the private club, dealing with the legendary Joe Baum, and they were holding this single malt scotch tasting for club members and we were invited. It was like an accelerated wine tasting. You can get pretty loopy pretty fast and our host was from Scotland, enjoying every moment and Jules, our client, insisted I try this Rob Roy. It was a match for me! You should try it.

Zach, Agata and I played Bananagrams in front of the fire while dinner was being prepared. Because it was my birthday, they let me get away with “luvv” (I kept on getting those darn v’s) and “eazy”. It’s good to be the birthday girl!

I still didn’t win!

But I digress – on to dinner. We started with fresh shrimp sautéed in hot pepper, parsley, garlic, and olive oil, served with warm crusty French bread for dipping in and scooping up every last drop of the delicious olive oil, served with a ’97 San Marco from Tuscany – a beautiful Tuscan red.

Dinner was Chicken Scarpariello served with sides of spaghetti squash with a fresh tomato garlic sauce and oven roasted Brussels sprouts tossed with blue cheese. It was fantastic!! Wine was a Portuguese 2007 red from this wine store we recently found on the Upper East side. Check out Park East Wines and Spirits on York Avenue at 87^th St. Tom Anderer is the Manager and very helpful. He is a certified sommelier.

Dessert was a lovely cheese plate complete with Medjool dates, Golden Delicious apple wedges and toasted walnuts.

Quite a feast! All so wonderful!

Tonight we’re having homemade tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches – a break from the richness of the past 3 days. I hope your holiday weekend was also filled with wonderful family times and scrumptious food!