Spirituality and Pasta Sauce

Many people I know had a food they did not like as children. However, over time their appreciation for, and experience of, that food changed over time. For me, this was especially true of pasta sauces. As a child, my favorite pasta preparations were boxed macaroni and cheese and Spaghettio’s. The latter being my favorite primarily because of the sauce. It tasted so much better then my mom’s sauce. She made hers by mixing catsup, cream cheese, and oregano together. I was in my teens when I first experienced I home made pasta sauce which exceeded my expectations and changed my relationship with pasta and with Spaghettio’s, which no longer were acceptable to my palette.
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Nothing Says Lovin’ Like Somethin’ From The Oven

I remember growing up seeing the Pillsbury commercials with the little dough boy, Poppin’ Fresh, who would always say “Nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven. He was so cute, he made you want to go out and buy those products and have biscuits, turnovers, and pies straight from the oven. This for me was homemade. It was my idea of something from the oven, homemade baking. The next version of homemade I remember was my mom getting some frozen dough from the store and baking that in the oven. I remember loving that bread. It always tasted so much better then the store bought. I especially loved it when it first came out of the oven and you ate it warm with melted butter on it. Those were the days. Several years ago, I learned how to make bread from scratch. I have not made it in a long time, as my schedule had not allowed it.
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Slow Cooking

Deciding how to approach working my way through Deborah Madison’s book has been interesting. I could not quite figure out how best to do this or how to approach it. So I decided to start with the Z’s and work backwards in the alphabet. So after making this ziti recipe, which I liked and Zoë thought was ok, I began on the zucchini recipes, much to Zoë’s chagrin. She is not a zucchini girl. So you can imagine her surprise when after reminding me for a week that she does not like zucchini, she enjoyed this simple dish of slow cooked zucchini with fresh herbs, feta cheese and Dreamfield's pasta. Unlike Zoë, zucchini has been one of those vegetables I have always enjoyed. I have eaten them raw, used them in bread and chili, prepared them breaded and fried, stir fried, and grilled.
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Spiritual Pizza

Growing up I have these fond memories of my parents bringing us to Mario’s pizzeria. I could not tell you where it was anymore, I just remember it being one of those foods we all loved. It was not something we had very often. I remember the cheese, which seemed to stretch for miles, the aroma of the pizza parlor and time spent with family. Over the years, my memories of pizza have changed. With the advent of corporate pizza chains who delivered and frozen pizzas, it went from being one of those special treats that I savored to something you ordered when you didn’t feel like cooking or needed a quick comfort food. While I have been intrigued by some of the techniques like putting extra cheese in the crust, pizza has been losing it’s specialness for me. As I have been working to transform our diets and have us eating healthier, it has been one of those foods, which just never seemed to fit the 30 grams of carbs rule.
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Our pantry got a remodel

Monday started like any other day. Zoë and I got up, ate breakfast, showered, dressed, and started in on our daily routines. Zoë went to the doctor’s for her past due checkup and I continued working. Then she came home and shared with me that she had to start taking a medication to control her blood sugar and needed to meet with a diabetes educator. Since I do most of the cooking, our doctor suggested I go with her. To be honest, neither one of us was surprised, well not totally. But there is this feeling when you actually hear those words – you have diabetes. I am grateful that Diabetes is something treatable. Less then 100 years ago, it wasn’t.
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It is more then just a kitchen!

When I first was led to foodbuzz.com, I was not sure whether my writing about food would fit. I am not a restaurant reviewer, nor do I spend hours developing recipes. Yet, for me, food is so much more then that. My philosophy of food has changed dramatically over the years. When I was younger, food ranged from something that you had to eat to avoid being punished (my mother could bake, but not cook) to something which amazingly appeared before your eyes at a restaurant and you did not have to do the dishes. Food came from the small markets, the grocery store, and the backyard. My favorite foods were the raspberries that never quite made it from the raspberry patch to my mother’s kitchen and the pickles, pickled tomatoes, and sauerkraut at the pickle king. There have been times in my life when food was what you ate because you were hungry, but for a good part of my life, food was a source of comfort.
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