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

Farmer’s Market Bounty

August 11, 2013 by Mary Frances 6 Comments

NOW is the time to enjoy all the fresh goodness of summer!! Last Friday when we stopped by our Farmer’s Market at the Milan Town Hall in upstate NY, we were treated as stars, for talking about their chickens and vegetables in my blog post on July 28th. Milan Farmer's Market Celebrity chickens on Love the secret ingredient blog.
The chickens were celebrities too! Isn’t this so cute?
Second Chance Farm price sign.

Farmer's Market summer bounty.
 Here was some of our bounty last Friday!!
Farmer's Market bounty with blueberries and peaches.

This is the time of year for simple dinners made with super fresh ingredients. Just toss them with a little olive oil, salt and pepper and throw them on the grill and you will have total yumminess!! (Use a grill pan if you don’t have outdoor space.)Grilled broccoli and yellow peppers in a blue and white striped bowl..

Last night we did just that with broccoli and yellow peppers. Just delicious!!

Grilled shisido peppers in an antique blue pottery bowl.

And then last week we grilled Ethel’s shisido sweet frying peppers with just olive oil, salt and pepper. Totally amazing!

Our oldest son and his girlfriend were with us last weekend in the country and she made this most beautiful pie. Peaches and blueberries with a super buttery crust, absolutely made with LOVE. She said her mother always put a heart on top!Peaches and blueberry lattice topped pie with a buttery crust.

So please enjoy the bounty at your local Farmer’s Markets and support them. We need for them to keep bringing us pure, delicious, unadulterated, clean food grown with LOVE and care, to keep us healthy and happy!

 

Filed Under: Dinner, Sides, Vegetables Tagged With: broccoli and yellow peppers, corn, Farmer's Market, grilling vegetables, grown with love, made with LOVE, Milan Farmer's Market, peach blueberry pie, Second Chance Farms, shisido peppers, tomatoes

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 4th. 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.

Upstate New York waterfall.

Our neighborhood waterfall.

Corn field in upstate New York.

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!

Filed Under: Breakfast, Travel Tagged With: bike rides, breakfast, Columbia County, corn, farm fresh eggs, horses, orange juice, roadside flowers, smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, toast, upstate NY, vacation, waterfalls, willow trees

Food Alert! Pesticide-Ridden Canned or Frozen Corn

October 17, 2011 by Mary Frances Leave a Comment

I just received this email today and wanted to share it with you. My upstate farmer friends, Ethel and Tom, have told us that even the deer won’t eat GMO corn. For every dozen GMO plants, you must plant a non-GMO one and the deer will only eat that 13th plant. They know!

Here’s the email:

Canned corn alert.Surveys over the past decade have consistently shown that Americans don’t want to eat genetically engineered (GE or GMO) food. Despite the overwhelming opposition to this risky new food technology, the biotech giant Monsanto continues to impose its unlabeled GMO’s onto our dinner plates.

The latest: Monsanto’s new GMO corn, intended for the frozen and/or canned corn market. This experimental corn will not be labeled, so consumers cannot know when they may be eating a GMO food that contains a toxic pesticide in every bite. Monsanto’s corn is a new GMO variety that has been genetically modified for three different traits, to resist two different insects and to withstand heavy spraying with Monsanto’s toxic Roundup herbicide. Because there are already untested varieties of other insect-resistant and Roundup-Ready varieties on the market, federal regulators are not requiring ANY approval process—which means NO public comment on its introduction into our food supply.

CFS has teamed up with the Center for Environmental Health to urge major companies that make frozen and/or canned corn to take action to avoid Monsanto’s new crop. We need tell Del Monte, Bird’s Eye and other major food makers to reject this new GMO corn. General Mills (Green Giant, Cascadian Farms) and Trader Joe’s have already said they will not use Monsanto’s new GMO sweet corn in their products—so can the other top companies!

Take action today! Send food makers a message that we don’t want Monsanto’s food experiments!

 

 

Filed Under: Dinner Tagged With: canned corn, corn, frozen corn, GMO, pesticides

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Mary Frances

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