There’s a phrase we often hear when we travel north: Minnesota Nice. It refers to how friendly the folks in Minnesota are, and that’s especially true when you visit in the summer months. After being snowed in and freezing in sub-zero temperatures all winter, they are ready to go out and about and are happy …
Continue reading “‘Chew’se a chocolate-free bar cookie for your summer treat”
When I graduated from college and rented my own home for the very first time, I decided that I would do my darnedest to cook meals for myself as much as possible and avoid premade stuff from the freezer section. I remember one of the first times I fired up the stove, heating some oil …
Continue reading “Oven mistake? Just keep calm and ‘berry’ on”
Until I really started exploring some Asian recipes during the pandemic, the ginger in my spice cabinet was pretty much only for baking sweets. If you would have asked me, I would have said it was there merely for projects like pumpkin bread and ginger snaps. Boy, was I missing out on an entire, delicious …
Continue reading “‘Rice’ to the occasion with tasty caramelized pork”
It’s the time of year that Joey’s bowling team comes for their end-of-season cookout at our house. That means Joey throws something on the grill or smoker, and I figure out some tasty sides and desserts to make them all happy. The guys are always gracious enough to put up with new experiments from me …
Continue reading “Your guests will go hog wild for this amazing bean dip”
When I was a kid, Hershey’s sold powder for chocolate milk in brown, kind of rectangular containers. I loved (well, love) chocolate milk, and I remember a specific day where I was snooping through the cabinets, seeing what I could find, and there I spotted it: a brown, rectangular-ish container, emblazoned with “Hershey’s” in big, …
Continue reading “‘Espresso’ yourself with some great chocolate cookies”
I’ve said before that trying to figure out measurements while Joey cooks is pretty much a herculean feat. He’s a man who always measures with his heart. And, boy, does his heart love our spice cabinet. That’s perfectly fine with me, though, because he is great at combining flavors, and he’s also the person you …
Continue reading “Get your mojo going with this citrus-forward pork recipe”
After finding a huge, eight-pound pork butt on sale a few weeks ago, our first inclination was for Joey to throw it on his smoker, as he normally would. Instead, we debated a bit back and forth about what kind of new recipe we could try, and it turned into what we deemed to be …
Continue reading “This kick-butt crockpot recipe should be on your list”
If you didn’t know, we recently celebrated the first-ever “Local News Day” on April 9. The effort to observe local journalists around the country came from a push in Montana. In Newton, we had a small, but mighty, group of community members who stood outside our office with signs, touting the importance of having a …
Continue reading “There’s no doubt you should cobble together dessert this week”
When I look at my bookshelf of cookbooks, I often think of a lady I never got the opportunity to meet in person but whom I feel connected to through a very sweet gift: Merna Snay. Merna, a former resident of the Mount Hope and Haven area, was a prolific cook—and by all reports, a …
Continue reading “Vintage crunch recipe gets two ‘plums’ up”
Something I love about Joey is that he is often quite willing to jump into a grand kitchen experiment with me. Recently, that was when I pulled out my pasta roller, and instead of merely making noodles, as I have so far since I bought it, I proposed creating ravioli from scratch. He was totally …
Continue reading “This week’s dish is ravi‘whole’i made for someone with spare time”
