In our family, birthdays were always very special. The birthday celebrant got to sit at the head of the table, and was honored with a red dinner plate at supper time.

The birthday boy or girl also got to choose the main entree of the night. It could be anything within reason. One birthday I chose ice cream sundaes! Continue reading→

I always laugh when I hear the term ‘plain vanilla’. Vanilla is anything but plain! It has a pleasantly complex, yet distinctive flavor and aroma.

Add vanilla, to improve whatever you’re eating or drinking. Nothing quite beats fine quality French vanilla ice cream with little black specks of vanilla seeds!

Continue reading→

If you have as many cookbooks as I do, you know there usually is a section in the old-style family cookbooks called “Jams, Jellies, and Preserves.”  Nothing compares with the happy homemade goodness of fresh fruit jams, jellies and preserves made during the summer and spread on biscuits or bread right out of the oven.

It used to be that everyone canned the bounty from their gardens and fruit trees, making jams, jellies, and preserves in huge quantities. That was just what you did (and you liked doing it). Now you can hardly meet anyone who knows the difference between a boiling water bath and a sitz bath. Once in awhile I will make some refrigerator jam (the kind that doesn’t require boiled jars), but like most folks these days, I usually comparison shop for the best buy at the supermarket, and hope my choices are good.

For variety, I often try different brands of jams, jellies, and preserves to see if any are distinctive. According to How Stuff Works.com, jams, jellies and preserves are all made from fruit mixed with sugar and pectin. The form of the fruit is what makes the difference:

Jam – The fruit is from fruit pulp or crushed fruit.

Jelly – The fruit is in the form of fruit juice.

Preserves – The fruit is from chunks of fruit with sweet syrup.

The great thing about making your own family cookbook is that you don’t have to follow any pattern set by anyone else, even the tried-and-true cookbook rules.  It is all your own creation, and you can include whatever recipes you prefer.

If you are a jam maker, then by all means, add those family recipes to your cookbook in your “Jams, Jellies & Preserves” section. It is easy with the recipe template in our do-it-yourself cookbook software. Just click “choose this recipe’s type” and you can create a new section or category, and type in or cut-and-paste any family recipes.

P.S.  I have a Concord grape vine that is trying to make raisins because I keep forgetting to pick the fruit. If I don’t go out there soon, I won’t get a single whole grape or raisin,  and certainly won’t make any jams, jellies or preserves. Oh well, I really only grow them for the birds.

Happy cookbooking,

Erin

One of my favorite foods is a bowl of popcorn. I’ll admit it publicly. Popcorn with salt and a buttery flavor is divine in my book.  I’ve been known to eat a bowl of popcorn for dinner without any additional nutrients.

One time, my dear friend Ruth and I were sharing a bowl of popcorn.  I like to eat the small crunchy bits that have barely popped–you know, the ones that have the roasted popcorn flavor and can ruin dental work.

While Ruth and I chatted and munched, I kept getting cold wet pieces of popped kernel. I didn’t think too much about it, figuring the kernels were just pockets of cold oil surrounding the barely popped popcorn kernel.

So I continued munching. All of a sudden, I spied Ruth dropping something into the bowl of popcorn. She was putting back the pieces she couldn’t chew and I was eating them!  LOL. After a bit of lively discussion about disgusting habits, we divvied up the remaining popcorn.  Ever since then, Ruth gets her own bowl of popcorn!

I found more information about one of my favorite foods, and here it is:

Popcorn Trivia
– The shape of popped popcorn kernels can be classified as either “butterfly” or “mushroom,” with the latter more perfectly round popped kernels being favored for flavored popcorn treats, such as Cracker Jack caramel corn. The photo above shows the two types.
– The world’s largest popcorn ball measured eight feet in diameter and weighed 3,415 pounds.
– Popcorn is the official state snack food of Illinois.

Ways to Pop Popcorn
– Fireplace (a long-handled cast iron skillet with lid was often used or a wire basket over an open flame).
– Steam-driven stovetop kettle, invented in 1885.
– Stovetop (circa 1950s, remember the Jiffy Pop aluminum pan that always burned the popcorn?)
– Hot air poppers (circa 1970s when healthier eating was on the rise) that circulated heated air to avoid burning popped kernels and push the popped kernels out the chute into a bowl.
– Microwave.

On another note, I don’t use popcorn for decorative Christmas ornamentation. To me it’s far too good to string on a tree. And, the thought of using it for packing purposes is beyond me. And, popcorn balls for Halloween treats–nope.

Give me a plain old bowl of popcorn any time.

Happy Cookbooking,

Erin

What if you woke up tomorrow and your computer was destroyed? Would you mourn the loss of a $600 appliance, as though it were a broken refrigerator? Good for you. You’ve probably got everything saved somewhere else. You’ve got a backup.

If that idea brought on a rush of panic, you HAVE to back up your data immediately. Every computer on this planet will fail. Yours, mine, the ones at NASA. All of them. It’s just a matter of time. When yours fails, you need to be ready. You need to back up your data. If you don’t, you will lose everything.

You can back it up into the cloud with a paid service, but if you are like me you kind of like knowing not everybody in the world can access your data.

Here’s how you can have cloud-free backup that survives even home disasters.

Step 1. Find a Backup Buddy. This is someone you will trust to keep your backup data with. The important thing is that they are offsite. If your house burns down or a hurricane swept through, it would be devastating on many levels. It will be even more devastating if you lose all your digital pictures and old emails too.

Step 2. Buy two portable hard drives. An 80 gigabyte hard drive is the smallest common size and should do fine, unless you have a lot of video.

Step 3. Use backup software to copy your computer’s data to one of the hard drives. Windows XP comes with a free backup utility under Program Files\Accessories. Windows Vista comes with Backup and Restore Center found in Control Panel. There are also a number of other backup softwares out there too.

Step 4. Get your Backup Buddy to backup their computer on the other hard drive.

Step 5. Exchange hard drives. You keep their hard drive and they keep yours.

Step 6. Back up your computer again on the other hard drive. Make a backup once a day or once a week. Only you really know how often you should back up. The test is to ask yourself, “If I lost everything on my computer from now until the last time I backed up, would it be horrible?”

Step 7. Once a month, exchange hard drives with your Backup Buddy.

If you are worried about privacy, use a fire-proof safe or a safety deposit box as a Backup Buddy. The important thing is to get the information on your computer out of your house and somewhere completely safe from fires, burglars, hurricanes or whatever else life throws at you. Having two separate back hard drives gives you the convenience of backing up your information right at hand, and the added security of knowing it’s backed up in two different places.

Some people may think, “Well, if my house burned to the ground, losing my digital pictures would be the least of my worries.” Those people couldn’t be more wrong. If you lose your house, those precious photos, emails and *ahem* family recipes could be the one thing that helps you get through it all.

Erin