Do you make your own spaghetti sauce? I do and I follow a recipe that was my mom’s. Now. My mom was English without a drop of Italian blood to her name. Nevertheless, she made damn fine spaghetti sauce. Authentically Italian? Of course not. But truly delicious? You know it.

When I was newly married I told my mom I wanted to make sauce and I wanted her recipe. There was a long pause on the phone and she finally said, “I don’t have a recipe.” I thought she was being secretive and didn’t want to share but what she really meant was that she didn’t have a written recipe because, like most good cooks, it was all stored in her head. We made a plan that I would go and watch the next time she made sauce and that’s what I did. I wrote everything, and I mean everything, down, from the type of hamburger she bought to the brand of tomatoes she used. Of course she didn’t actually measure any of the seasonings but she guesstimated for me and I wrote down those amounts for the garlic, basil, oregano and parsley. In the end, I cobbled together a pretty good recipe for my mom’s sauce.

That was almost 25 years ago and I’ve been making it ever since. Of course, my written notes are long gone and now I have it all stored in my head. I got to thinking, though, that Hannah might want to make her nana’s (and her mom’s) sauce one day so I decided a blog post was in order. Plus, I had a picture of the big vat of sauce I made that I wanted to show you. Ahhh, a blog post is born.

The ratio of ingredients is 1 lb burger, 1 onion, 1 pepper, 8 oz mushrooms, a 29 oz can of tomato sauce and a 29 oz can of tomato puree, plus garlic (preferably fresh), basil, oregano and parsley. The technique is simple: saute the vegetables and garlic in one pan and the meat (with plenty of salt and pepper) in another, mix them together and add in the other spices and the cans of tomato sauce and tomato puree. I usually add a can of tomato paste and a bit of sugar, too. Now, you can make a small batch for one meal but honestly, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to make homemade sauce you might as well make a big pot and that’s just what I did last Sunday.

I like to let the sauce sit for a day so we had spaghetti on Monday night. I shared some with my father-in-law and then froze 12 additional bags of sauce for us to eat over the coming months.

And you know that I will think of my mom every time I pull one of those bags out of the freezer.

Delicious!

When it comes to cookies for Christmas I have some that I just have to make every year. Peanut butter balls and Polish tea cakes are a must and I usually make ginger cookies, too. It’s fun to try new recipes, though, and this year I hit on a winner: Cherry Chocolate Kisses.

The recipe is from The Curvy Carrot and you can find it here. They look just like Peanut Butter Blossoms but the flavors are completely different from anything else I make and that’s the main reason I wanted to try them.

They are pretty and delicious and I am very glad that I made them.

I have always thought that homemade cranberry sauce is divine and the best and easiest thing you can do with fresh cranberries. I made something last Sunday, however,  that may make me change my mind. Cranberry Jam.

I saw this recipe and new immediately that I had to give this a shot. I’m so glad I did. It’s quick, it’s simple and delicious. A trifecta.

You start by pulsing cranberries in a food processor. Pulse, pulse, pulse and you wind up with pulverized cranberries.

Then you put those cranberries in a sauce pan with some sugar and a teeny bit of butter. Turn on the heat, stir it around, and wait for it to boil. Once it’s boiling you add a bit of liquid pectin and turn off the heat.

Next you fill up your jars. I had these small bar jars and I didn’t have any fresh lids so I just filled them and stuck them in the fridge. If you want to can the jam then you need to go through the process of sterilizing the jars and all that jazz – no big deal at all but I just didn’t bother this time.

The jars of jam are beautiful and you can just see those antioxidants glowing in the sunshine from my kitchen window.

So far I have had some on toasted challah bread and Dale has had some on a turkey sandwich. We both agree that it’s amazingly delicious.

I may not agree with Southern politics but I sure do love Southern food. Fried chicken, grits, biscuits, fried green tomatoes . . . I love it all. Lately I’ve discovered a new-to-me Southern food that I really love – Pimento Cheese. I made it for Hannah’s birthday cook out back in September and I made it for our Halloween party and both times I could not get over how quickly it disappeared. It disappeared so fast, in fact, that I hardly got any and neither did Dale. So I made some for just us today. We’re about to watch a movie and later there will be football and this pimento cheese will be a great snack.

It’s so simple – grated sharp cheese, grated extra sharp cheese, a jar of pimentos, a little mayo and some cream cheese. It’s not healthy but it sure is gooooood.

The Thursday Challenge for this week is Yellow. I just so happen to have some yellow summer squash.

We’ve been getting lots of awesome vegetables in our CSA share each week. We’ve had sweet corn and lettuce, beets and peas, green beans and zucchini, potatoes, blueberries, summer squash and much much more. Picking up these vegetables each week makes meal planning fast and easy – I just add some sort of meat or fish cooked on the grill and we are good to go.

Fresh vegetables from our CSA is just another reason why I love summer.

I’m always on the look out for new pie recipes, particularly ones that use seasonal fruit. When I saw this recipe for Strawberry Pie the other day I knew I had to make it.  Just like the author of that post and creator of the recipe, I prefer strawberries on their own. I’m not a big fan of rhubarb and those pies with the fresh strawberries on top are pretty but I don’t think they taste all that great. A pie with a filling of cooked strawberries with not much else but some brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg seemed perfect to me.

Strawberries were on special this week at my grocery store so I stocked up.

I made my regular pie crust Friday morning and I cut up the strawberries in the afternoon. The brown sugar mixed with the juice from the berries and made a wonderful thick syrup.

The recipe calls for 5 cups of strawberries but my pie plate is extra deep so I had closer to 6 cups, I think. I could have shoved a few more in there but I was worried about them being too juicy so I left it alone.

Usually when I make a lattice crust I cut my pieces very narrow. I think it looks fancier that way but this time I wanted a really rustic looking pie so I went for wider pieces for the lattice. I just love the way it looks.

The smell as it baked was a heavenly mixture of crust and strawberries and spices. I was drooling by the time I pulled it out of the oven. And it wasn’t too juicy at all. The strawberries held up nicely and the pie sliced up beautifully.

Looking good and smelling good is all well and good but, let’s face it, the most important thing is tasting good.

I think you can see, from the smile on Hannah’s face, that it tasted as good as it looked and smelled. It was truly delicious and we all enjoyed it. Hannah had the last piece for breakfast on Monday morning and said it was just as good as on Friday.

I’ll definitely be making this pie again soon. After all, it’s strawberry season.

If you’ve read this blog for a while you know that I bake cookies at Christmas. I have already shared my favorites, Polish Tea Cakes, so today I will share Hannah’s favorites.

Neapolitan Cookies

Ingredients

The one with all the pie tips . . .

1. You all know I make my pie crust from scratch but you may not know that I make it ahead of time. I made all the crust for the Thanksgiving pies last Sunday and I wrapped them in plastic wrap and stuck them in the freezer. It made things much easier on Wednesday, aka Pie Baking Day.
2. When I make apple pie I use about 8-9 apples. I peel them and slice them and mix them with flour, sugar, and cinnamon. Then I let them sit in the mixing bowl, stirring every now and again, for about 30 minutes. This allows the apples to soften a bit and then there is no shrinkage of the filling while the pie cooks.
3. I use One Pie canned pumpkin to make my pumpkin pie. I’ve done the whole bake-the-pumpkin-from-scratch thing and I just don’t think it’s worth the extra work.
4. There is no meat in my mincemeat pie. I use the little box of mincemeat pie filling and I reconstitute it with water. It’s apples and raisins and spices and it’s a very rich and delicious pie, especially when it’s served with vanilla ice cream.
5. When I make chocolate cream pie I use the cook and serve chocolate pudding from a box. It’s honestly better than my homemade chocolate pudding. When I make banana cream pie I make the vanilla pudding from scratch and then add sliced bananas. It is fabulous and rich and just about the best pie of all the pies I make.

And that’s that! Four Saturdays, each with five things about me, for a total of twenty new things about me.

Now I think I will go have some leftover pie. Mmm. Pie.

It seems like pumpkins are everywhere I turn these days. There are pumpkins to be carved and pumpkins to be baked and pumpkins to be turned into delicious treats. I wanted a fun and easy dessert to go with our turkey dinner last Sunday so I made Pumpkin Whoopie Pies.

They were awesome. I used a recipe I found on Home: Made Simple and the only thing I changed was to double it. I think I wound up with about 24 whoopie pies.

The cream cheese frosting is delicious and the cake is light and flavorful and everyone really loved them.

While I believe that traditional Whoopie Pies made with chocolate cake and buttercream frosting are still the best thing going, I will definitely be making these pumpkin ones again!