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That's what this pasta sauce has been dubbed. It isn't actually famous, and sometimes (most of the time) it isn't cooked all day, but it is mine. This sauce recipe is my very own creation and very much an Italian recipe. What I mean to say is, this recipe includes a lot of nonstandard measurements. This batch of sauce easily feeds ~5 adults. More or less depending on how much the people you're serving eat. You can double the recipe, or triple the recipe. It freezes well if you want to make a large batch in advance. I love making pasta sauce. It doesn't have to be an exact recipe every time. If you want mushrooms one day and none the next it's fine to omit them. As long as you put it on pasta, it's pasta sauce. This recipe is what I put in the pot every time. Ingredients 2 tablespoons Butter 1/2 Onion, finely chopped Baby Bella mushrooms (omit entirely, choose a different type, pick how much you want) 4 or 5 maybe 6 garlic cloves, minced ...

On Sunday May 26th, we celebrated our 6 year wedding anniversary.  When we were first moving to Nebraska we were told that if we liked doing outdoors stuff we would love Nebraska. We laugh at that now because there really isn't anything to do outside in Nebraska. Where we live now in East Tennessee is more lush and green than the Mahoney State Park is and the forest in Bellevue required an $11 entrance fee per adult and $8 for Calvin. Usually when we go on a hike we travel south to the National Park. I asked if we could go check out the National Recreation Area. So we traveled north a couple of hours to Big South Fork for our anniversary. The kids napped on the way up so it was a peaceful drive. You can't go far in East Tennessee without seeing something beautiful. We took state road instead of interstate on the way up, but even on the interstate on the way back, the scenery is just stunning. In Big South Fork we decided to take an easy trail so Calvin would be able to...

The point of the Bookshelf posts is to organize my thoughts on this year’s reading, and keep a log of books I have read. These aren't reviews meant to tear apart books otherwise we could be here all day. I read for pleasure and sometimes I enjoy crap writing. I almost always finish what I'm reading. I don't include books I've dropped in my book total regardless of how much of it I read. If it's particularly bad, I will write about it. My goal this year is to average one book per month with a total of 12 books for the year. My local library has been a fantastic place to bring the boys and they have helped rekindle my love of reading. At the writing of this post I am at 7/12 books. I really got started in  April. Note: I always hyperlink the title to its Good Reads page. The Tale of Halcyon Crane Wendy Webb The Tale of Halcyon Crane is Wendy Webb’s first published novel, and the second of her works my librarian, Susan, suggested to me when I asked for g...

RECIPE Chewy Gourmet Chocolate Chip Cookies   Makes 18 Ingredients 2 cups plus 2 tablespoons of unbleached all purpose flour ½ teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon table salt 12 tablespoons high quality butter (browned and cooled to nearly room temperature) 1 cup (packed) golden brown sugar (you can use light or dark depending on preference) ½ cup granulated sugar 1 large egg plus 1 large egg yolk 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract 1½ cups chocolate chips (high quality semisweet) Preparation Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Whisk dry ingredients: Flour, baking soda, and salt in a medium bowl and set aside.    In a mixer with a paddle attachment, beat butter and sugars 1 minute on medium until smooth. And the whole egg, egg yolk, and vanilla extract and beat another 30 seconds, scraping the sides of the bowl if necessary. Add dry ingredients and mix on low until just combined. Dough should be firm at this point. Add chocolate chips and mix until incorporated....

Hello everyone and welcome back. I won't waste your time with pleasantries, let's get to work. Now that we've starting to assemble the new kitchen, I thought it would be a good time to talk about what we've chosen to do in here. We spent a long while thinking about how to make the layout of this kitchen better for us. We had to keep the corner sink because the windows are in the corner. We determined that we really couldn't change anything. Something we kept coming back to and dwelling on was having a double oven. I also wanted to have an electric oven and a gas range. We looked into dual fuel ranges, we looked into an oven with a cook-top above, we looked into double ovens. By the time you paid for a cabinet and the oven and cook-top you might as well buy an industrial duel fuel, but I just kept going back to wanting double ovens. Where do you put double ovens in this kitchen? That was our problem. This is certainly not laid out to be a chef's k...