All my birds are out and about, enjoying the spring. I hear them all a lot more than I see them, but then I guess they are all busy building their nests. I certainly enjoy hearing them sing their pretty little tunes. But I really enjoy seeing them a lot more.
It’s bird season. You’ll hear them first, but soon they will be out. Keep your eyes and ears open for the songs of spring. I am actually hearing them sing to me right now, even though it is still dark outside and is early in the morning. 🙂
Lemon and strawberries. Does anything say spring more than lemon and strawberries? I don’t think so. Once again, I combined these two great flavors to make a delicious cake for our Easter dessert.
Strawberry Lemon Curd Cake
I made a lemon bundt cake and added lemon curd and diced strawberries as the filling. It was so moist and full of flavor.
Preheat the oven to 325* F or 163*C.
Spray a bundt cake pan with cooking spray.
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 sticks softened butter
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
1/2 cup yogurt or sour cream
1 tsp vanilla
1 TBSP lemon juice
1 tsp lemon extract
1-1 1/2 cups diced strawberries
1/2-3/4 cup lemon curd
lemon glaze
colored sprinkles, optional
Combine all the dry ingredients together and mix well.
Beat the butter and sugar together, then add the eggs one at a time, mixing in between each addition. Mix in the yogurt or sour cream, lemon extract, lemon juice and vanilla.
Add the dry ingredients 1/2 at a time, mixing in between. Do not over mix.
Spoon 1/2 of the cake batter into the prepared pan, then spoon in the lemon curd, and spread it around the center of the cake. Add the diced strawberries. Add the remaining batter on top of the strawberries.
Bake for about 1 1/2 hours, or until the cake is golden and a toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the middle.
When the cake is completely cooled, remove from the pan and add the lemon glaze and colored sprinkles.
Lemon Glaze
2 cups powdered sugar
1 TBSP lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla
dash of milk
Whisk everything together until it is smooth and creamy. Drizzle over the cake.
I hope you all had a good Easter celebration. Have a great day and make everyday great. Stay safe and stay well. ‘Til next time.
Just a quick note to say we have company in town. I may or may not be able to share a lot this week, but I will play it by ear, and we’ll see what we can do. Hang tight though. 🙂
The true meaning of Easter, for Christians, is the celebration of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead. It signifies his victory over death and offers hope of salvation and eternal life to all believers. Easter is a time for reflecting on Jesus’s sacrifice and the new life He provides through His resurrection. The cross stands as the most recognized and revered symbol of Christianity, representing the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
Easter commemorates Jesus’s death on the cross, which Christians believe atoned for the sins of humanity, offering forgiveness and a path to reconciliation with God. The resurrection provides hope for a future life free from sin and death. The earliest recorded observance of an Easter celebration comes from the 2nd century, though the commemoration of Jesus’ Resurrection probably occurred earlier.
Easter is also representative of spring and is a time for renewal, joy, growth and new life. This is represented through the “Easter egg”, which is associated with fertility and new life. The egg also symbolizes the resurrection of Christ, with the hard shell representing the sealed tomb and the cracking of the egg symbolizing His emergence from the grave.
The name Easter comes from the Germanic name Ostara or Eostre, who was the goddess of spring and dawn. Ancient celebrations took place in her honor in the spring equinox to represent the rebirth of nature. Many of the symbols we associate with Easter today come from ancient, pagan celebrations, such as the egg and the rabbit. Both eggs and rabbits are ancient symbols of growth, renewal and fertility. The Easter bunny comes from the German Osterhase tradition of the egg-laying rabbit (or Easter hare). This German tradition was brought to the United States in the 1700’s with the German immigrants.
The lamb is associated with innocence, purity, humility and divine sacrifice. Lamb, especially roasted lamb, is a traditional Easter dinner served in many parts of the world. In the United States, ham tends to be an Easter favorite. I too will be cooking a ham for our Easter dinner. I was also originally going to serve lamb as well, but we have company coming over, and they are not big lamb eaters, so ham it is.
Lilies are also associated Christ’s resurrection. Christian legend has it that lilies grew where Jesus sweat during His agonies in Gethsemane. White lilies in particular stand for innocence and purity, as well as the hope of life eternal. They are said to represent Jesus’ triumph over death.
There are of course numerous other images that are representative of Easter and Christ’s resurrection, but these are some of the most noted and known symbols seen around the world.
So for those of you who celebrate Easter, Happy Easter. And for everyone, have a great day and make everyday great. Stay safe and stay well. ‘Til next time.
And just for fun, here are some Easter bunnies found around my neck of the woods, or should I say, lakes. 🙂
This little bunny was in the window well of our basement.
The British and their “colonies” are known for their love of tea. It all started in the 1800’s when Anna, the 7th Duchess of Bedford who, at the time was a close friend of Queen Victoria and a prominent figure within London society complained of “having that sinking feeling” during the late afternoon. She wanted something small to satisfy her hunger, nothing too large, just something to see her through until dinner time. The afternoon tea tradition was born inside the houses of the rich and fortunate but once summer came around they wanted to take this fabulous tea time tradition outside into their beautiful gardens. People wanted to be like their lords and ladies and from that day forward the world wide afternoon tea tradition was born. Afternoon tea is a tradition that is a part of our lives, it is ever so English, classic and elegant.
Priscilla’s mom Ana is in town visiting for Easter, so Priscilla decided to have a little tea party for us. Priscilla is always the “hostess with the mostest”. Everything she does is always so elegant and beautifully charming. Every little detail is always done with love and perfection.
Priscilla and her very elegant table. She should be on the cover of a magazine. No matter what event Priscilla is hosting, it is always spectacular, and the food divine, but tea parties are definitely her specialty. Hosting tea parties are part of Priscilla’s DNA though. Ana used to own and operate a little restaurant, called “The Tea Room”, in Sierra Madre, California that she ran with Priscilla’s sister Kelly. It was always packed with celebrities and everyday tea lovers alike.
We started out with a delicate serving of a delicious tomato-sherry bisque.
That was followed by an array of delicious tea sandwiches, including egg salad, cucumber, curried chicken with a mango chutney, and little banana bread sandwiches.
There were warm, fresh baked scones with creme fraiche, lemon curd and strawberry preserves.
And we ended with some delicious little chocolate cakes, lemon curd cups and lemon-strawberry bars. And of course, we had an endless supply of tea as well.
Even though the weather was atrocious, and was snowing all day, the four of us had a lovely afternoon that led into the early evening. We were busy catching up and enjoying each other’s company the whole time. Priscilla and I, and of course Ana, have known each other since our junior high school days, back in Pasadena, California. Priscilla and Laura have known each other for many, many years, and Laura and I have been friends for many years as well. As always, it was a perfectly lovely get together. Thank you Priscilla, Ana and Laura for all your love and friendship over the years. 🙂
The little things in life are really the important things in life. It’s all wrapped up in the attention to the details that make things so special. Make everyday special. Enjoy your days with loved ones as you can and make as many special memories as time allows.
Have a great day and make everyday great. Stay safe and stay well. ‘Til next time.
I just never know what to expect when out walking. Sometimes I don’t really see much at all, and sometimes, I see so much. Sometimes, it’s just pure luck and timing too.
The other day, I saw a happy little House Finch up in the tree. He literally looked like he was smiling and just happy to be there. It was a cloudy, overcast day, but he didn’t seem bothered one bit.
This is my favorite shot of him. 🙂
There is no doubt about it that we love Mexican food. We eat it quite often. It is always a go-to for us. Making Mexican just comes naturally to me. Years ago, one of my chefs told me my heart was Mexican. Of course he told me in Spanish – “No esta una Americana o Gringo. Tu corazon esta Mexicana“.
We are still trying to use up our leftovers, certainly before I start making more dishes for Easter and this week while we have company. But we still need balanced meals. If I have leftover main dishes, then I need to make side dishes to go with them, and vice versa. This time I made a Mexican succotash as a side dish.
Succotash is a dish primarily consisting of corn and lima beans, often with other ingredients like tomatoes, peppers, and okra. It’s a popular side dish, particularly in the United States, with origins in the Narragansett Native American language. Instead of lima beans, I added some zucchini and crookneck squash, onions, Mexican spices and topped it all off with toasted pine nuts, or pinoles.
Mexican Succotash
As usual, I kept tweaking it until it was just right.
1 zucchini, sliced
1 crookneck, sliced
1 cup corn
2-3 tomatoes -although I had 1 HUGE heirloom, and only used 1/2 of it
1/2 red onion, diced small
salt & fresh ground black pepper to taste
dash of cayenne pepper
1-2 tsp dried oregano
1 TBSP fresh thyme or 1 tsp of dried thyme
1-2 tsp cumin
1/4 cup toasted pine nuts
Look at the size of these big, beautiful heirloom tomatoes. They are HUGE!!!!
One tomato was bigger than my hand, and I don’t have small hands either.
Get a large skillet very hot, then add the olive oil, corn, zucchini, crookneck, onions and seasonings. Cook for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently.
After the vegetables have softened and the onions are translucent, add the tomatoes and continue to cook for an additional 2-3 minutes, stirring frequently. Just cook long enough for the tomatoes to heat up, but you don’t want them mushy or to break down.
Add the pine nuts right before serving.
!Delicioso! !Disfrutar! This delicious side dish will go well with anything you want to serve it with. I served it alongside some fried chicken and mashed potatoes.
Have a great day and make everyday great. Stay safe and stay well. ‘Til next time.
Our Pelicans are beginning to arrive for the spring and summer. I just saw them a couple of days ago, but I wasn’t able to get any pictures of them on the lakes. However, we were able to get some good shots of them flying high above us. I looked for them yesterday, but I guess they still haven’t settled in yet. A group of Pelicans is refereed to as either a pod, a pouch or a squadron. We had a squadron of about 20 coming in, flying right over our deck.
I love seeing them and I am so happy I was able to get some good shots of them in flight, but I can’t wait to see them swimming in the lakes.
Peaches and nectarines are some of the oldest fruits in the world. Both were cultivated in China over 8000 years ago, but they have been around much longer than modern humans, at over 2-3 million years or more. They arrived in Ancient Greece around 300 BCE and Ancient Rome a couple hundred years later. They were referred to as Persian apples in both ancient Greece and Rome.
There are three main types of peaches found in China (northern, northwestern and southern), spawning over 495 different varieties found around the world today. They spread from China to the rest of the world. Today, they are grown in temperate regions all over the world, with China still being the largest producer of peaches and nectarines by far. Spain, Italy, Greece and the United States follow in production, but trail dramatically in comparison to China’s production numbers.
Peaches and nectarines are actually the same fruit and their trees look identical. They are both members of the Rosaceae (rose) family. Both are also known as stone fruits because of their large “stone like” seed in the center of the meaty flesh surrounding it. They are also called clingstone fruits because the pit clings to the flesh, or “freestone,” which means the pit pulls away easily from the flesh. Stonefruit, clingstone and freestone peaches fruits are all slightly different variations. The names describe how the “stones” or seeds, pull away from the surrounding fruity flesh.
Nectarines are genetic variations of peaches, but they are the same species. The main differences between the two fruits are that peaches are usually softer and have a fuzzy outside skin, whereas nectarines are often firmer and do not have a fuzzy skin. Nectarines are also a bit tangier than the sweeter peaches. Nectarines and peaches have similar nutritional benefits, including similar protein and carbohydrate counts and a high fiber content. They’re also both rich in vitamin C and A and contain small amounts of potassium.
Besides being delicious, healthy and well-loved fruits, they both represent happiness, immortality, indulgence and privilege in the Chinese and Asian cultures.
Apricots are cousins to both the peaches and the nectarines. There are both similarities and differences. Apricots are also members of the Rosaceae (rose) family, and are actually closely related to almonds, apples, and pears. Peaches are much larger than apricots — about four times as big. Peaches also tend to have more water inside their flesh which gives them their signature juiciness. Peaches tend to be sweeter than apricots as they have a higher sugar content, and their pit is jagged and rougher in texture than the pit of the apricot.
As healthy as apricots and stone fruits in general are, DO NOT eat the pits of any of the stone fruits, especially apricots, as many contain trace amounts of cyanide. Apricot kernels naturally contain cyanogenic glycosides, primarily amygdalin, which has the potential to release cyanide when ingested. Small amounts of cyanide can be detoxified by the human body but high exposures over a short duration can result in severe adverse health effects (i.e., cyanide poisoning). Symptoms of acute cyanide poisoning include weakness and confusion, anxiety, restlessness, headache, nausea, difficulty breathing and shortness of breath, loss of consciousness, seizures, and cardiac arrest. The amount of cyanide-producing amygdalin in peach pits varies. A single peach pit is not likely to contain enough of this chemical to cause serious harm to most people. However, some peach pits might contain enough amygdalin to be harmful to very small children.
Apricots originated in Western China, around the Russian, Turkish and Iranian regions of today. They were cultivated around 5000 years ago. Today, Turkey and California are the main producers of apricots. They thrive in dryer, more arid regions of the world.
Peaches, nectarines and apricots are all enjoyed in a variety of different ways, from fresh to canned to dried, as some of the favorite ways to enjoy them. You can cook and bake with all of them as well. If you substitute apricots for either peaches or nectarines though, you will need to add more liquid and more sweeteners, since they are drier and not as sweet as their larger, sweeter cousins.
Summer is coming and summer is fruit season, especially stone fruits. Enjoy these fresh, wonderful and delicious fruits while you can. But you can aldo can or dry them to enjoy after their season too.
The Western Slope (Western Colorado) is known for their Palisade peaches, but they won’t be available until late summer. Georgia peaches are great, and I do love them, but in my humble opinion, Palisade peaches are much better. They are so sweet and juicy and they are HUGE.
Make your days just peachy and enjoy. Stay safe (don’t eat the seeds or kernels) and stay well. ‘Til next time.
We all know that every living organism requires nutrients and food in order to survive. This is how we are all wired. It’s in our DNA. But how and what we eat is also important.
The history of food spans millennia, starting with early humans gathering and hunting for sustenance and progressing through the development of agriculture, domestication of animals, and the evolution of culinary practices. It encompasses not only the evolution of foods themselves but also the social, cultural, and economic impacts of food systems. Food history is a multifaceted field that draws on various disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, history, and sociology. Understanding the history of food provides insights into human societies, cultures, and their relationships with the natural world. Not only do we depend upon food for our survival, but the methods in which the food is obtained, prepared and consumed is also vital to our survival. “Food meant the difference between life and death – between a growing prosperous population and a struggling one”, (p. 9 – The Story of Food , An Illustrated History of Everything We Eat) and still does today too.
Today, we just go get the foods we need from the supermarket. We have a wide variety of different nutrients available to us pretty much at all times. This was not always the case though.
The history of food is the history of human development. Early humans were plant eaters, and ate mostly a varied diet of fruits, seeds, bark, and occasionally meat. But they were were raw and uncooked. About 2.6 million years ago, tools were made for hunting and fishing, which added much needed nutrients and proteins to the diet of early humans. Early humans were hunters and gatherers until just about 13,000-10,000 years ago. They would pick it, dig it up, fish for it, hunt and kill it. When they found a new food the only way to find out if it was edible was to just try it. If it tasted okay and didn’t make them sick, everything was well. But this method wasn’t always the safest method of eating. People very often got sick and died as a result of eating bad or poisonous foods or foods that were undigestible.
As humans learned to make food storage vessels and other tools, they also learned how to cook and preserve food, which allowed them to carry safe and healthy food with them as they moved from place to place.
Once people started realizing they could grow their own food, rather than just relying on what they could get through gathering, hunting and fishing, they also starting coming together as communities as well, with everyone playing important and different roles in food gathering, storage and food production. Domestication of animals started around 13,000-10,000 years ago, and the beginnings of agriculture began during the Neolithic period, at around 9300 BCE. It is believed that the first domesticated animals were goats and sheep. The rise in agriculture also promoted a more sedentary lifestyle, meaning people did not have to move around as much, in constant search for food. This allowed for the growth of communities and social structures.
The use of fire to cook food was discovered about 1 million years ago. By cooking foods, the various nutrients of the foods were unlocked and allowed for better diets. Cooking foods allowed for better digestion of the foods and took away some of the food poisoning effects and germs of eating raw foods. Cooking foods also led to the people have smaller jaws and intestines, while also allowing for a higher caloric intake of foods, which in turn led to bigger brains and stronger bodies.
Obviously, one of the first methods for cooking foods was grilling it over an open fire. Baking foods is also a very old way of cooking foods, dating back at least 7000 years ago, once grains were first grown and cultivated. Bakery products, which include bread, rolls, cookies, pies, pastries, and muffins, are usually prepared from flour or meal derived from some form of grain. Baking foods was another way of cooking the foods, but was also a way of making foods more transportable, by baking them in a “crust” of some sort, which enabled people to take their foods with them.
Once people began cultivating and growing their foods rather than always having to depend solely on what they could find or hunt on their own, communities and cultures started to develop as well. People were no longer relying solely on themselves for survival, but now turned to providing for and benefitting from groups, which enabled more to survive and to thrive. People began living together and eating together as families and as groups.
Numerous studies have been conducted on the effects of familial and communal eating. The results are no surprise at all. Study after study reveal that “the more often people eat together, the happier they are” (p.12 – The Story of Food , An Illustrated History of Everything We Eat). Studies also show that when children eat meals with at least one of their parents on a regular basis, they have fewer problems and are more well adjusted over all.
Food has been around since the beginning of time, and will continue to be a necessary tool for our survival until the end of times. But the journey of food is always evolving. We will always have a connection to the foods we eat. We are what we eat, and that is included in our societies, our traditions and our cultures as well. Our past will always inspire our future. Our past and our future will always be connected to who we are and to what we eat.
I hope you have all learned some new things about the history of the foods we eat. Eating together and celebrating the gift of food together makes us all happier and healthier. Have a great day and make everyday great. Stay safe, and eat and stay well. ‘Til next time.
A Jeanne in the Kitchen 