I must have been sorting socks when the kale bandwagon rolled by. I missed the whole arc, from common vegetable to decorative winter landscape plant to foodstuff so pervasive that Time magazine suggests banning kale as a word in 2015. (Personally, I would have voted for the word, “So,” in its overuse as the intro…
Category: Dinner
Green Pepper Steak with Tomatoes
The book sat on the edge of my desk for months. Amazon packaged it poorly, so the paperback arrived with its cover mangled, and it irritated me. To exchange it for a pristine copy was my option, of course, but that seemed like more trouble than it was worth. I finally picked up the…
Sauteed Boneless Chicken Breasts
A tender, tasty, boneless chicken breast is supposed to be easy to produce in a skillet, but as a novice cook, I often served my family ones that were either tough and overcooked or rubbery and not quite done. (Ignorance can be dangerous.) I followed instructions from a variety of cookbooks, but the outcomes were…
Pizza Sauce
Writing a Cookbook Wall post begins with either a random thought or a delicious flavor. Usually, the process is driven by a recipe which I decide is too good to keep to myself and must be recorded. It’s blog-worthy, and my daughters might want to make it someday. Sometimes I have a thought that isn’t…
Halftime Nachos
Super Bowls: I watch the commercials; I tend to cooking chores or refill my plate during the actual game. Halftime gets my undivided attention if done well, and Bruno Mars did it well last Sunday. That’s about the time these nachos were ready to eat, so I had the best of all worlds: good food,…
Stir-fried Chicken
Macy hopes gravity will prevail. ♦ ♦ ♦ You’re going to want to cook this on your next bad day. I did. I was glad this recipe was in my arsenal last week, because good food shared with loved ones can take the sting out of most bad days. This chicken dish is delicious and requires little thinking,…
Chunk of Chuck, Two Ways
I joined the throngs of Arkansans at grocery stores last Wednesday, stocking up on foodstuffs before sleet and ice would make travel impossible for a whole (ahem) day and a half. We Southerners are wired as a people to respond to inclement weather by buying chunks of meat and making chili, stew, and pot roast….
Chicken Frijole Soup
Making this soup the other day required deboning a rotisserie chicken in front of a rapt audience of four dogs. They sat two to my left and two to my right, about 150 total pounds of canines quivering with the effort of self-control, their silent yearning palpable: Oh, please, please, drop the bird. They behaved…
Meatloaf Pucks
I really tried to think of a better name for this delicious entrée, but Meatloaf Pucks just seems appropriate. Obviously, marketing is not my forté. As a liberal arts major, I never set foot in the UALR** business building during college days. But God has a sense of humor, so he surrounded me in life with…
Glorious Chicken And Squash Bake
A recent Sunday morning started with an abrupt end to a languorous, late sleep, the rare kind I would have killed for when my kids were small. Bo the cat was nestled in the crook of my arm. Without my thick glasses, I struggled to focus in the general vicinity of the person standing next…
Cookbook Wall 