Sweet River Studios

If you're overrun with tomatoes at the end of the season and you don't want to start canning, making tomato jam is the next best thing. I admit it. I'm not a huge fan of raw tomatoes. I like them as salsa and especially in BLT sandwiches but I have to admit, I'm not a fan of the watery squishiness that plagues my sandwich causing my bread to get soggy or help the mayonnaise make a run for it but with tomato jam, you don't have that problem. Making tomato jam is simply taking pounds of tomatoes and cooking all the water out of them and adding a bit of sugar and spices. That's it. Trust me on this. It is awesome and I'm not a huge tomato fan. I would recommend doubling the recipe since this does't make very much and it's just so darn tasty you might want it on everything from toast, eggs, quiche and of course to accompany bacon. Store your tomato jam in the refrigerator and it should keep about a week or two but I don't know since I've neve...

My husband and I decided to leave the dreary weather of Ohio behind for a few days and head to Phoenix, Arizona. We've never been there before and I know very little of Arizona except there's a desert, hot air balloons, some big cactus and the sun. Before going anywhere, I usually shop for my next vacation on TripAdvisor reading reviews of locations and activities. I found myself reading about the Boulders Spa and Resort and decided that's where we would stay. The resort is situated around a golf course and I was told the area is 1300 acres with the resort on about 33. There is landscaped areas and some wild areas that was really nice to walk through. A lot of the plants were blooming making it an even more memorable experience. The resort area was full of rabbits, lizards and birds to watch and enjoy as well. I have to admit, I thought the staff did a remarkable job. Everyone was pleasant and efficient and treated their guests very, very well.   The resort uses golf ...

2018 was a fairly nice year for us and pretty quiet. I took some really great cooking classes and learned a lot of different techniques and used a lot of different spices.    I also spent a few months completely remodeling 2 bathrooms with the help of YouTube strangers and my local Lowe's. This was a big project for us considering the only make over stuff we've done is to open a can of paint. The bathrooms were done from floor to ceiling. New flooring, new faucets, new toilets, new light fixtures and some re-wiring and lots of joint compound and a lot more. But both bathrooms look great. I had some unique bird visitors to the yard this year. I had a pair of bluebirds trying their best to have a successful nest but didn't manage to get one egg out of 17 to hatch. Don't know what's up with that pair but I hope if they come back to the bird boxes they actually get to raise some young next year. I want baby blues! I had a very brief visit from a tree swal...

The last chef we're discussing in class is Daniel Boulud. Our instructor met him through friends at his restaurant and she remembers that time fondly. She even said that he gave her a tour of the kitchen. Our lunch for the class consisted of parmesan baskets with herbed goat cheese, wild mushroom and barley soup, spaghetti squash, alsatian potato gratin, marinated lamb chops with two sauces, grand aioli served with vegetables and shrimp, bacon wrapped belgian endives, waldorf salad and chocolate ginger pound cake with ice cream.  Our starters was the parmesan baskets and aioli with vegetables and shrimp. The parmesan baskets were easy, mild and tasted great. The grand aioli is basically homemade mayonnaise but done a little differently then just mixing some oil into your egg yolks. Garlic cooked in water until soft and you also poach an egg (the whites are set but the yolk isn't) and then add everything to the blender and drizzle in the oil. So a little different but th...

Our next two cooking classes features recipes from Amanda Cohen and are all vegetarian. All of these recipes were labor fairly labor intensive. For example, our instructor, worked on drying out some zucchini for over 24 hours to prep one dish for the class as well as some others. So needless to say, we wouldn't have been able to get everything done in one 3 hour class session if we had to do all the work. We made several dishes as usual which included parsnip gnocchi with sour red cabbage and carrot crumbs, portabello mousse with pear and fennel compote, smoked sweet potato nicoise salad with chickpea dressing, butternut squash soup with butternut dumplings, Knishes, zucchini ginger cake with zucchini cream and zucchini candy with cinnamon caramel and cream cheese ice cream and the cocktail of the class was Kentucky Lemonade. This menu was really good but fairly difficult unless done in stages or unless you have 1/2 a day free to cook. For example, the parsnips needed 2 hours...