Hot weather’s coming. I’m ready for it. I’m tired of the cool, rainy spring we’ve had. I’m planning ahead for all the fun things I’m going to do in the hot sunshine of the summer days that will soon be here! Antique shopping. Hammock testing. Barbecuing. Working on the Sailboat. Iced Tea Sipping. You can see, I’ve got a list going already! When the temperatures go higher and I’m looking for a cool dessert, I [...]

The Chiquita Banana Jingle. Chances are, you can sing, or at least hum, a few bars of the famous Chiquita Banana jingle. The song first hit the airwaves in 1944 when Miss Chiquita made her debut. It was written to help teach Americans how to ripen and use bananas, which were, at the time, an exotic tropical fruit. At its peak, the jingle was played 376 times a day on radio stations across the United [...]

Spring seems to be having an identity crisis. For the past month, temperatures across the country have been feeling a lot like early summer — 80 degrees in Chicago?! — but a trip to my local farmers market doesn’t match up. Weaving through the aisles of produce stands reveals spring’s typical bounty of oranges, artichokes, asparagus and even strawberries, but there’s not a hint of a summer’s harvest. Mother Nature has pulled a cruel bait [...]

Mother’s Day — May 13th this year — means strawberry pie for me. Some people think of fancy hats, teas on the lawn and corsages. That’s not how my family celebrated Mother’s Day. My grandmother, Dora, was a huge fan of strawberry pie. She believed you could tell the class of a restaurant by the quality of their strawberry pie. She passed the same appreciation on to her daughters and granddaughters. Along with this appreciation, she [...]

For my first post, I decided to share a recipe that is very old. I remember making it as a teenager and that is almost 50 years ago. Ha… I told you it was old. $100 Chocolate Cake is the original name, but I think with inflation that name should be changed to what…… $1,000 Cake, $10,000 Cake or maybe $1,000,000 Cake? To keep with tradition, I will use the $100 Chocolate Cake name. A [...]