At Home My Way

I haven't been posting very many recipes simply because I've been making the same old same old in my kitchen lately.  Why?  Because I've been working on my garden most every spare minute.  We still eat, yes, but we eat our old standby's that don't require a recipe like hamburgers on the grill, sandwiches, if we're lucky - homemade pizza , spaghetti, stuff like that. Here and there I've made some desserts like Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake or the Cinnamon Crumb Cake I posted the other day. I love garden vegetables.  I love the thrill I get when I can actually grow something!  I don't use any chemicals in my garden, usually with and without success, but I keep trying.  I have a few terrific resources.  These people and books are teaching me volumes.  A favorite book that I read every spring (because I'm weird like that) is The $64 Tomato .  It's a great read about a man who worked for years on his dream garden, and then decided to put numb...

I want to post this delicious little (snack size) Homemade Yellow Cake recipe.  This cake is really good!  Sometimes its hard to find a scratch yellow cake that tastes as good as a box cake.  But, with this recipe, who needs a box??  Not me!  I think this one is better!  It has that yummy aroma and taste of a grandma cake! Last night I needed a little something sweet.  I didn't have any special ingredients on hand, just typical pantry stuff.  I decided to top this cake with a cinnamon crumb topping.  It turned out wonderful!  Even my husband loved it.  He's not much of a sweet eater, but he's been slicing off slivers since it came out of the oven.  This would work well for an afternoon snack or even a coffee cake to serve to friends or family.     You could also make the cake as cupcakes (it would only make 12 cupcakes) and/or frost with your favorite frosting (and not use the crumb topping)!  My favorite ...

This weekend I mixed up one of our all time favorite cakes - a Chocolate Mayonnaise Cake .  That cake is extremely moist and deliciously chocolate!  Typically I just soften a little margarine, add some cocoa, powdered sugar, a drizzle of milk & vanilla, mix it well, and call it good, but I had handy a recipe that my mom gave me eons ago for chocolate frosting.  There's just nothing like a good fudgy frosting! I know lots of people use canned frosting and when you're in a pinch, they're fine.  I promise you though, if you ever try making your own homemade frosting, you will never look back.  This frosting will be good for cupcakes, fancy cakes, sheetcakes, brownies, spread between graham crackers, you name it!  This makes a fairly small batch of frosting.  If you have a mixer, use it.  Mix on med-high for a few minutes and you will be rewarded with a fluffy, creamy, and fudgy frosting that will win over all who taste it.   I frost ...

      A couple of weeks ago, the most EXCITING thing happened! My sister-in-law called us at about 8PM one weeknight.  Weeknights in winter or early spring are boring for us.  I make dinner, we do dishes, we eat, and we kick back.  Until the weather warms up and there is mowing to do, we generally don't do much that is entertaining during the week. My hubby was all laid out on his bed watching TV and I was in a similar position in my recliner.  My phone rang and my sister-in-law rarely calls me so when I saw her name on my phone, I answered right away.  She asked me if we still had honeybees?  I told her that all of our three hives had died the previous year so we didn't have any.  She told me that a friend of hers was mowing and found a bunch of bees hanging on a branch in her yard.  Normally, if bees are in a tree they are nearly impossible to capture.  You have to get the queen and if she would be inside the trunk ...

One of our favorite "cooked by dad" treats is smoked pork loin.  My husband can cook rather well (even though I do most of the cooking at our house).  The one thing he is most known for at our house is his ability to make delicious smoked meats!  He has a "real" smoker and uses only wood, typically hickory since we have lots of that available to us. Years ago I found a recipe for homemade dry rub in a Southern Living magazine, back before the Food Network and Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives LOL.  Last night as I was digging through every unorganized piece of paper containing a recipe in my kitchen searching for that recipe, it occurred to me that if I had that recipe on this blog, I wouldn't have to search to the ends of the earth to find it!  So, here it is! We use this dry rub for pork (loins, butts, or chops), and even chicken/turkey.  We love it!  We have shared this recipe with a few select friends and one of our...

I am a lover of fried chicken!  I love it from a grocery store deli, fast food, or buffet restaurant.  But seriously, who can tell you they don't love one of those southern comfort-type Sunday dinners that involve fried chicken, real mashed potatoes, summer squash, green beans and lots of homemade desserts?  You know, the kind we all ate at our granny's house when everybody was getting together? Sadly, I don't have a granny to make those type meals for me anymore... Although I only remember MY granny typically frying chicken LEGS for some reason LOL???  My mom doesn't really care for chicken so its a rare occasion that we eat chicken at her house (although I do beg her sometimes for a favorite meal that I grew up eating called "Chicken & Yellow Rice").  But, I digress. Last night I had some gardening to do to beat the next downpour that is sure to arrive here in Missouri late tonight.  So, I had the extra time required to make this oven baked ...

We have had some seriously cold and rainy weather here in central Missouri.  It seems the sun only shines and there is enough warmth to feed the soul on days that I am locked away at work.  Ugh! Being a Florida native, this weather has really gotten me down!  I find myself dreaming about "home" (Florida), trying to find ways to move there, fighting the urge to start boxing my stuff to leave, and basically making everyone miserable around me who accepts that this has to be a way of life LOL. But... my dear friend Cindy called me Sunday and told me that in spite of the terrible weather, her strawberry patch was LOADED!  She invited me out to come pick some berries. My friend's strawberry patch is relatively small (I would guess about 6' x 12') but LOADED it is!  She has picked and picked, and I went out and picked only about two rows which completely filled a plastic Walmart bag.  I had just gotten home and dumped my berries into this...