At Home My Way

  What recipes do you know by heart?  You know, the recipes you pull out of your soul when you cook on auto pilot; the recipes that a special loved one made for you once upon a time and now you make them for the people you love? Recipes You Know by Heart By Gina 2025-  www.AtHomeMyWay.blogspotcom What recipes do you know by heart,  made from memory each time you start?   Where recipe books sit packed away  and stains adorn them where they stay.   Where biscuit bowls sit and wait  for sifts of flour and sleepers late.  Where sizzling butter becomes pancakes fluffy  a nd tummies become happy stuffy Where muffins don't need a mix  and frosting needs no special tricks. Where warm chocolate pudding doesn't start with a box and ice cream churns in icy rocks So many Spaghetti Sundays through the years  for celebrations, hugs or tears.  Simmered slow by moms and grannies with bread to swipe all the crooks and crannies. ...

A friend of mine at work brought leftovers for lunch the other day.  It was a bright little bowl of macaroni and tomatoes.  I had to ask her what she had made because it looked so yummy! She told me it was a simple dish that she often made for herself when her hubby wasn't hungry for supper- "Noodles & Tomatoes". My friend lives in the boonies so that explains why she would be making this dish when eating alone instead of my temptations when eating alone (take out chinese or the golden arches-eek!) LOL.   I remembered making a similar dish a few years ago.  I'm a fan of simple dishes, the ingredients for which I would have in my pantry.  I'm also a fan of cheap, frugal food and this fits the bill on all counts. This dish is a little more complex than it seems.  It can be dressed up or down with the addition of cheese (purely optional- I prefer no cheese in mine).  You can add spices (I don't).  I like it in its purest form - pasta - ...

Sometimes you just need a quick meal idea - to get some food on the table.  Sure, you can run to your favorite burger or pizza joint, but all of that food you have in your pantry/cabinet is already there, right?  You might as well cook it and be $10+ richer in your pocket?  That was my theory the other night, anyway... I really wanted to go out for supper.  I get home from work 6PM-ish and had managed to force myself to go for a run.  My only problem is that after a supper-time run, I am really famished by the time I get home!  I tend to gravitate to takeout food in times like these, but I took a deep breath and a long look in my refrigerator and this is the meal I came up with. It was DELICIOUS!   It immediately brought me back to the days when my dad was a long distance truck driver and my mom made us quick and easy suppers like these to stretch her budget.  A meal like this can be stretched with more or less hotdogs and more or less c...

This Sunday's Game Plan cooking involved trying a new recipe and making lots of old ones.  I find that repeat posting these on my blog is a good thing.  Sometimes its nice just to see what I'm cooking and it's always good to have a reminder of successful recipes. As always, my mission for Sunday cooking involves making ahead some freezer lunches for the coming week, getting a game plan for breakfasts, and browsing the contents of the freezer so that I have a menu in mind for supper ideas.   This weekend was especially successful at avoiding restaurants and saving money.  I find that weekends I am the most tempted at eating out but I made most everything we ate all weekend.   Friday night I helped my sister-in-law and her family get ready for a garage sale.  They ordered Casey's pizza (which is my favorite take-out pizza these days) so I did have that for supper but it was their treat for all the work we hammered out that night so it didn't cost me any...

I remember eating this recipe for peach cobbler a LOT when I was growing up.  It seems like we always had dessert - a couple of times a week anyway.  We ate lots of chocolate pudding  on homemade biscuits ; chocolate cakes, and this recipe for peach cobbler. This recipe is a dump type recipe (but no cake mix is involved).  It turns out ooey-gooey and just wonderful!  I love it hot or cold.  When I was little I remember loving the gooey dough part the best, but now I love it all!   This is an easy recipe to throw together while you are cooking supper.  It bakes in the oven for about 45 minutes to an hour.  I think my mom even made this with fruit cocktail, which would also be delish, or even canned and pitted plums, which I want to try.  But we usually just had it with canned peaches.   When I made this recipe recently, I used my own home canned peaches (one pint jar).   Here's how I make Peach Cobbler 1-2-3 AT HOME ...

This is one of five apples that  I grew on my little apple tree this year!  Woo-hoo! This dip and I go WAY BACK.  I cannot remember when I first started making it.  It is delicious  and is the perfect summer BBQ potluck dish or addition to any holiday dinner.  I even make it as a little special something to serve with lunch.  I serve it with almost any fresh fruit, but our favorites are apples, strawberries, and grapes.  One day last week, I even brought the marshmallow fluff and cream cheese to work with me.  By lunch, the cream cheese was soft and I stirred it all together for a treat to go with my apple.  I've kept it in the fridge at work eating a little bit each day.  It would also be perfect for sending to school in a lunchbox! I remember that I helped my aunt prepare food for my cousin's wedding many "moons ago" and we bought big blocks of cream cheese from Sam's (as big as blocks of Velveeta) and made tons of th...

The other night I whipped up a batch of Homemade Chocolate Pudding.  I decided to throw CAUTION to the WIND because I didn't have any cornstarch.  My recipe calls for cornstarch.  But I know that flour is also a great thickener so I used flour to see if that worked.  Did it work?  It SURE DID!  I couldn't tell a single bit of difference!  In fact, I will probably use flour now instead of cornstarch.  I don't use much cornstarch in my kitchen and I always have flour so I was glad to discover that as a substitution.  The pudding was thick, chocolatey, and warm.  What a combination, huh? If you haven't tried warm, chocolate pudding, then definitely put that on your list of things to try. I posted this recipe a long time ago when I made my younger daughter's' "Last Supper" before she left to go to Kansas City to college.  But this recipe deserves a post of its own.  It's that good! Pudding is a grea...

My mom always made lots and lots of biscuits when I was growing up.  Given my age...dot, dot, dot, (LOL), some of the homes I grew up in didn't always have air conditioning, eek... hot, hot, hot.  That was also before eating out became quite so "acceptable" nor were we able to find so many prepackaged items for meals - so my mom ALWAYS cooked supper - from scratch - with real food.  No matter how long her workday was or how hot it was, she always cooked supper (and we weren't overweight... go figure).  Usually we had meat, a starch, a vegetable, and either biscuits or cornbread.  If we had spaghetti or tuna casserole, we still had some sort of bread.  Sometimes the bread was my favorite part of supper, since we also wouldn't EVER consider telling my mom "I don't like that."  We just ate it and that was that. When our kitchen was blazing hot, it was a real NO-NO to turn on the oven for obvious reasons.  Mom ...