Happy Memorial Day!

When I woke up this morning, I heard the rumble of thunder and the tap-tap-tap of pouring rain. A cool breeze blew in the windows, cooling down the house for the first time in days. Now, it’s sunny and warm … That’s one of the things I love about spring: the contrast of cool breezes and warm days.

What I also love — about both Memorial Day and spring — is that summer is coming soon.

Today’s Eat. Live. Be. topic is all about summertime. Specifically, our favorite things about summertime. What are you most looking forward to this summer?

For me, it’s the beach. Hands down, summer isn’t summer for me without toes dug into the sand, swimming in the cool Long Island Sound and lunches eaten precariously by the water (where I frantically try to keep sand out of my sandwich).

We love everything about the beach: Kayaking in the waves, riding my beach cruiser along the shoreline, laying in the sun (with sunscreen on, of course), running on the sandbar, searching for periwinkles and hermit crabs, creating sandcastles, flying kites on windy days, seeing how far we can walk out on the sandbars at low-tide, boogie boarding and even screech-worthy skim boarding. We’re all ready for a beach-filled summertime.

Looking for some tasty bites for your next beach adventure? Try these! Read the rest of this entry…

Clear as day, I remember the first time I had white clam sauce. I was probably 8 or 9 and out to dinner with my family at this great pasta restaurant on the Connecticut shoreline. The restaurant is not there anymore, but when it was it could be relied on for amazing, delicious housemade pasta dishes served with bread so fresh it was still warm from the oven. I remember reading the menu and wondering why the white clam sauce was so different from the red sauce, which I knew I liked. I asked and was told it wasn’t as good as the red sauce. Still intrigued, I ordered it anyway.

White clam sauce is a different world from its red counterpart. It’s nuanced in flavor, lighter in texture and ultimately lets the clams really be the star, supported by garlic and other flavors. Usually, it has butter and white wine in it to round out the flavors as well — though not always, as this recipe attests.

And yes, that first time I tried it, I did like it.

When I recently received a review copy of Cristina Ferrare’s Big Bowl of Love: Delight Family and Friends with More than 150 Simple, Fabulous Recipes, I totally and immediately gravitated to Cristina Farrare’s recipe for clam sauce. It’s a simple version made with ingredients you probably have in the pantry (plus fresh parsley). For the fresh parsley, I ran out to my herb garden and cut some to use, but it’s also readily available at the grocery store. Then, the pasta came together super fast. Less than 20 minutes later, I was taking photos of the final dish. I loved that it’s this easy and simple to make. Also, the infusion of lemon really makes it amazing.

So far, I am loving Cristina Ferrare’s cookbook. When I opened it, it instantly inspired me to get into the kitchen and try something, which is a reliable sign of a well-done cookbook.  The recipes and photos (and let’s face it: photos are a must in today’s cookbooks) make you want to try everything. And if this recipe is any indication, the flavors are worth the effort.

Read the rest of this entry…

When I signed Will up for track earlier this year, I figured it would be a good opportunity to try something new. And as a kindergartner in the league, he was always at a disadvantage at meets. But none of that bothered him. Will loves to run and cut more than a second from his 50-meter dash over the last month.

He’s not the fastest. He’s not the strongest. But he loves it, and he couldn’t be prouder of his trophy for a season well run.

Some days I have everything planned out and ready to go … but today just wasn’t one of them. Fortunately, I have so many delicious dishes that I have been whipping up lately for my freelance clients and I am dying to share them with you. Here are a few of my recent recipes that appeared on Tablespoon.com …

Beet and Greens Salad – This is a simple salad, but one that’s so, so good. Filled with baby spinach, beet greens, beets and blue cheese. It’s simply dressed with good balsamic vinegar … but don’t let all the simpleness fool you: it’s really one awesome salad.

Black Bean and Sausage Tacos – Don’t let the name of these mislead you … they are filled with a healthy mix of black beans and chicken sausage. Super tasty (Paige ate 3! She never does that!), they are a great alternative to the standard ground beef taco filling.

Easy Honeyed Pear Turnovers – These tasty turnovers are filled with a sweet, nuanced honey-pear filling. And if you love those two things, you will adore these.

For a long, long time I have avoided any recipes that fall into the fruit salad or fruit cup or fruit cocktail genre. As much as I love these delightful sweet salads, I just didn’t see the point in offering recipes for them. The reason was simple: fruit salad is ridiculously easy and adaptable, and I felt like I would be insulting you to write about one. I mean, really, fruit salad in any rendition can hardly be a recipe, right?

Wrong. So wrong.

I guess I was thinking about fruit salad (fruit cocktail, fruit cup … whichever you prefer) as just cut up fruit tossed together — and sometimes it is. But it doesn’t have to be just that. It can be something more in depth, pulled together with a sauce or syrup to lend a slight similarity to different fruits. And when you are talking about fruit cup or fruit salad or fruit cocktail in those terms, a recipe is totally in order.

I’d like to introduce you to Summer Fruit Cocktail with Lime-Vanilla Bean Simple Syrup.

Don’t let the title mislead you. This fruit cocktail is neither too tart or sweet. The Lime-Vanilla Bean Simple Syrup instead lends a subtle sweet-tart to the dish, and brings the fruity flavors together. It’s like the ribbon holding a stack of love letters, binding it without becoming the contents. And despite the long name, it takes a relatively short time to toss together.

I suggest chilling it for 30 minutes to an hour before serving … but if you are pressed for time, you could eat it right away instead. It’s all up to you.

I like to eat this for breakfast with a barely buttered thin bagel (Thomas’ Everything Bagel Thins are so good. No, they didn’t pay me to say that. I discovered them at Costco and bought them all on my own) and a glass of milk. Just in case you were wondering.

Tell me about your favorite fruit cup, cocktail or salad!

Read the rest of this entry…

For awhile, I knew that my efforts to make my Eat. Live. Be. For a Better 2011 goals weren’t working. I was stuck. Plateaued. And, at worst, sometimes the scale was going in the wrong direction. Embarrassed, I stopped updating you on my progress. While I continued to try to lose and try to make exercise work within the confines of my life, I just had no wins to share.

So I didn’t.

And it was in the private place of feeling defeated and wondering why I should even continue to try that I found my answer: I have to. I have to keep trying. I have to find the way that works for me. And, above all, I have to succeed. I have two young kids and they deserve a mother who is fit, active and healthy.

This week’s Eat. Live. Be. topic is all about change. How important is it to your goals that you change things up (such as trying a different exercise regime, cooking with a new method or changing how you manage your eating)? How have you changed things up over the last five months?

In the past five months, I have started running again, tried several exercise regiments, worked on eating better, drank more water, worked on saving money and lost weight. I also gained a little, felt down and defeated at times and tried like crazy to keep my chin up. In the past few weeks, I made a really big change that I’ve been mulling and considering for a few months: I started actively tracking everything I eat.

For a long, long, long time I swore off any sort of food tracking. I mean it’s so time-consuming, and it adds so much work to eating. Guess what? I can honestly say that it’s not a bad thing. It’s made me put a lot more thought into every single morsel that I put into my mouth. And since part of this is making a commitment to being honest with myself, I’ve gotten a big get-real look at what’s been holding me back. Read the rest of this entry…

Tasting cups ... different brew methods.

Coffee and I? We’re old buddies. I grew up in a coffee-drinking family, who gathered every weekend day for a leisurely cup. In summer, we’d all sit on the sun porch — even before I started drinking coffee myself — and chat, sometimes inviting neighbors in with a friendly call out the window. Sometimes, we still do that.

My first cup of coffee was had at age 10. We were in Florida for Thanksgiving, and my vacation friend (she and I were always there at the same time every year) and I decided to be a little rebellious and have a cup from the free coffee bar. My family didn’t bat an eye, and I’ve been drinking coffee ever since. By the time I hit sophomore year of high school, I had my own gigantic travel mug that accompanied me to school every morning until I lost it in college.

Eventually, I cut back on my consumption. I mean, really, brewing a whole pot just for me? That’s a little too much. These days, I usually have one to two cups a day. Sometimes I have three, if I end up at the coffee shop to get some work done. Turns out, all the coffee drinking is a healthy move. My husband is now up to two to three cups a day himself, something supported by recent research that drinking a couple cups a day can lower the risk of prostate cancer in men. (Ladies, good news for you too: female coffee drinkers also have a lowered risk of developing breast cancer.)

A Starbucks in Seattle

But coffee drinking is more than a health move or a morning ritual: it’s a social thing. Coffee brings people together — neighbors over a morning cup, spouses at the kitchen table, co-workers in the latte line. There’s no secret why the term coffee klatch came into existence. Coffee is naturally friendly. Read the rest of this entry…

For more than a year, I have barely eaten beef. While I like it, my body isn’t fond of it and I’ve found that avoiding it means that I can live with less bouts of my severe asthma – and less medication. It was a no brainer to eat less of it.

That said, I have never set out to eliminate it from my diet altogether. Everything in moderation, you know? So, with summer nearing (could someone please tell Mother Nature that summer is almost here? I don’t think she got the memo for New England), I plan to enjoy a few burgers this summer. But because I rarely eat beef, I want to make it count when I do.

At the same time, I have made a commitment to losing weight and generally being healthier. It’s kind of a catch-22. I want to be healthy, but I also want to enjoy life … and the food I eat. And while I do really like turkey burgers and chicken burgers, nothing substitutes for a great beef burger when that’s really what you want. So, what’s a girl to do?

Ultimately, I come back to moderation. Cheddar Bacon Burgers are delicious, but when it comes to trying to be healthy, they aren’t the best choice. The cheddar and bacon add so much more unhealthy fat to the beef burger. After struggling with this, I decided to stick with 85% fat ground beef, which produces a juicy, flavorful burger. But I cut out both the cheese and the bacon. (I’ll still have cheese with my turkey burger though!) And for the roll, I am now skipping the bakery rolls and traditional hamburger buns in favor of the thin multigrain rolls that I eat sandwiches on for lunch. They work well and hold up to the burger while having less calories and more fiber.

But a plain burger? Even a juicy, flavorful one enhanced with salt and pepper needs something more, something to make it great. Enter the veggies. My Super Veggie Beef Burger is like a fab salad combined with a juicy, amazing burger. The avocado (yes, it has fat, but it’s healthy fat) adds a creaminess that substitutes well for the missing cheese. Then there is crunchy red pepper, smooth baby spinach, sweet tomato slices and crunchy alfalfa sprouts (well, sort of crunchy). When you take a bite, you get this surge of flavors, wrapped in the dripping juices of the great burger. It’s amazing.

I’m not giving up my occasional beef burger … when I have one, you can bet that it will be piled with fabulous fresh veggies.

How do you like your burger?

Read the rest of this entry…

A few weeks ago, Will spied a lone very ripe (ahem, brown) banana on our kitchen counter and declared that I should  make banana bread. He adores banana bread. And bananas, for that matter. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to whip up a batch then.

Today I finally got around to baking some … in jars, of course. I was tempted to call this one Chocolate Chip Banana Cake in a Jar, but really it’s basically banana bread … or banana muffins, depending on how you look at it. Really the only difference is the vessel I used to cook it in. What would you call it?

Anyway, one of the reasons for making this today is that I wanted something to send in to Paige’s classroom for her teachers tomorrow. It’s teacher appreciation week at our school (yes, I know most schools already celebrated that!), so it seemed like the perfect time to gift them with a little something. We’ve been blessed with wonderful, patient and kind teachers who love kids and make their school days so special.

Really, this is the perfect something for a teacher gift. Just top ‘em with a canning lid and tie a little card to the top to let them know what’s inside. I used basic kitchen twine, but you could go fancy with some pretty ribbon too.

As for the Chocolate Chip Banana Bread, it’s positively lovable. It’s perfectly moist, with a light crumb. I’ve added just a touch of cinnamon that gives the flavor a little depth, without really making its presence known. It’s subtle. And mini chocolate chips are the perfect addition to the sweet banana batter. It’s based on my recipe for Chocolate Chip Banana Nut Bread, but is minus the nuts to comply with the nut-free environment of our school.

The Chocolate Chip Banana Bread is baked directly in the jars on a baking sheet in the oven. I keep an old baking sheet around just for the occasion. It’s perfect for being the firm surface for small containers like this. And yes, jars are perfectly okay for baking. If you don’t have them already, you can pick some up at most grocery stores or online.

What’s your favorite food to gift?

Read the rest of this entry…

My grandmother was an amazing, vivacious, full-of-life woman who loved days at the beach, fresh corn bought from farms in the summer (long before it was en vogue again to do so) and green grapes. She did not, however, love to cook. Though she could make a mean spaghetti sauce and great lasagna and she cooked almost every day, it just didn’t fall into the category of things she loved to do. She did it because she had to — to feed her family.

A while back, I was gifted my grandmother’s 1950 edition of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cookbook. It was one of only a few cookbooks that she owned, and is well-worn, with a peeling binding to prove it (any tips on fixing that?). Inside the book is a glimpse into cooking more than 60 years ago, something I love reading about. I have a whole collection of mid-century cookbooks and find them fascinating. But this cookbook is more than that … it’s a glimpse into how my grandmother cooked when she was about my age. Along with the occasional notes in the margin are recipe clippings from magazines and handwritten recipes that she stuck in there over the years.

It was in the pages of that cookbook that I found a slip of paper with a recipe for Chicken Cordon Blue written on it in my grandmother’s handwriting. Immediately I recognized the small paper, torn from the camel-colored notebook that she carried with her everywhere. It was in that notebook that she wrote grocery lists, things to remember and recipes given from neighbor to neighbor in the course of conversation.

I can practically feel the pebbled vinyl (I think) exterior as I write about that notebook, which was omnipresent in her purse. But while I knew the handwriting instantly, I couldn’t remember her ever making this dish — at least not from scratch. Nonetheless, I decided to try making this recipe first.

As these things go — attempting something I haven’t made before with sparse directions — I started making this a little later than I should have, misjudging how long prepping it would take. And when I got stumped on a step (how much oil should I be using anyway?!?), a few rushed phone calls yielded me the answer … and confirmation that this wasn’t my grandmother’s Chicken Cordon Blue, but rather likely a recipe she got from Mrs. S, the neighbor across the street.

I had to laugh when I realized that it wasn’t my grandmother’s own recipe, especially since that thought had been in my head the whole time. I mean, there is no way she would have used this many dishes and taken this many steps to make dinner (unless it was lasagna … but that’s different). No matter. It’s a great recipe for a delicious dish — and one that I plan to make again and again. Read the rest of this entry…