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

Birthday dinner!

April 1, 2012 by Mary Frances Leave a Comment

Crab cakes and lettuce on white dinner plates.

Crab cake on a Boston lettuce leaf with organic watercress and chipotle mayo

Birthdays are always very special in our house. I am happy to cook a magnificent meal of the celebrated’s choice, served at the dining room table with china, crystal and sterling. However, this year, my oldest son requested a surprise. Dinner was to be of my choosing, so here’s what I made:

Appetizers:
A cheese board with a variety of cheeses, dried apricots and walnuts

First course:
Crab cake on a bed of Boston lettuce and organic watercress with chipotle mayonnaise (search this blog for the recipe)

Main course:
Center cut pork chop with a grape and tarragon sauce (a Food and Wine recipe)
Homemade gnocchi with grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (a Food and Wine recipe) – this was divine!
Roasted asparagus with olive oil and fresh mint (my simple recipe)

Dessert
Vanilla pots with fresh strawberries (a Mark Bittman recipe)

Our evening was just great – a special time for just us to catch up on each others lives, watch funny You Tube videos together and of course it ended with viewing the return of Mad Men.

You know, it’s always wonderful to do a special dinner for just your family. When the kids were young, we used to do this every Sunday night. My husband insisted on this tradition, saying that we often entertained our friends specially and why shouldn’t we do it just for us. It gave us a time to regroup before starting the week and taught the boys how to behave at an elegant dinner. The conversation was slower and more interesting, providing a time for all of us to unwind. I hope you do this with your family, creating wonderful stories and memories along the way.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

February 14, 2012 by Mary Frances Leave a Comment

So tonight, what will you be doing? I’m not a big fan of going out in NYC. The restaurants are always packed and besides, I’d rather serve my own LOVE-filled food at home!

I’m planning on making a veal chop recipe with grapes, honey and sage. It’s a very memorable dish that I made years ago and I really haven’t repeated, quite frankly, because veal is so expensive. But tonight, it will be just the two of us so I figure I’ll go for it!

Now Zach (23) is still living at home with us and he needs a place for his dinner with his girlfriend. So I suggested a candle light dinner in our office conference room with food brought in. Sounds pretty good – right? They’ll be alone. I just need to get the conference room in shape from all the editing and packing for the move that we’ve been doing.

When the kids were little, I would always make these heart cookies that my mother used to make for us. They are an oatmeal based cut-out cookie, that you sandwich two together and then ice all over with a buttercream frosting. They are really good and get better with age as the butter soaks into the cookies. But as you can imagine, they are a ton of work. My oldest son, had us all over for dinner on Sunday night at his apartment in Williamsburg, and was asking about the cookies. With the move, I don’t think I’ll get to them this year.

It was wonderful to have dinner at our older son’s home, particularly after the full day of packing we did at the office. Zach helped us on Sunday and both boys helped on Saturday. (We are blessed with great kids.)

The dinner was a delicious chicken tagine with homemade chick peas and farro instead of cous cous (much better) and served with a mixture of mustard greens and kale, wilted under the broiler, and then tossed with a dressing of olive oil and balsamic vinegar! Divine!!

To all you young moms out there, this is what can happen if you serve your kids great fresh food cooked with LOVE. They will want to continue the tradition and even step it up a notch! Our older son’s most recent purchase – the French Laundry cookbook from Thomas Keller! I don’t even have that one and it is gorgeous!!

Happy Valentine’s Day to you all!

Fruit!

January 5, 2012 by Mary Frances Leave a Comment

So after enjoying all these wonderful meals and special treats and drinks during the holidays, I am waking up to discover that I am really fat.

Not really. But, you know, when you put on a pair of favorite pants and think they’ve suddenly shrunk in length (even though they were fine the last time you put them on), then you have to fess up to the fact that it’s the size of your hips that’s hiking them up and you know, Spanx can only do so much. So I’ve gained a few pounds and it feels really uncomfortable.

I’ve now gone back to “clean eating” – less meat, little or no carbs and having a piece of celery or a half of apple if I’m starving before dinner. It’s working. I’ve already lost 3 of the 5 pounds.

I think fruit is a wonderful thing. Some doctors have told me it’s too sweet, it has too much sugar. But it’s a natural sweetness, right? It’s refreshing, satisfying that sweet tooth craving and makes all things “right”, as my mother used to say. She would have a piece of fruit at the end of her lunch every day as well as pack an apple, orange or pear in our lunch for school. I have kept that habit up, only we have a small bowl of fresh fruit salad at the end of our breakfast everyday. What I do is make a very large fruit salad on Sunday morning, and then it lasts us for the week, making it super easy to serve up for a workday morning.

You can, of course, combine all sorts of things but I don’t recommend bananas, unless you eat them right away, as they don’t hold up. Leave your strawberries whole so they don’t break down as quickly and serve them up sooner than the rest. A pineapple is wonderful, along with grapefruit, oranges, apples, and red or green grapes. Blueberries, blackberries, mangoes and kiwi are nice as well, but need to be eaten first too.

And here’s a great tip, squeeze some fresh lime juice all over your salad and then top it off with torn fresh mint leaves. I have found that the mint leaf edges will not darken as quickly if you tear them, as opposed to cutting or chopping them.

So start your new year with fruit!

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

Birthday dinner!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Fruit!

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