Pantry Revisited

I get a little lax with my blogging during the holidays.  As soon as this week is over, I'll be back to cooking and blogging again.  I hope you will bear with me as I take a short break, but the holidays are always a little downer for me.  I believe Christmas is about family.  When you have no family to share it with, it can be the saddest time of the year.  Fortunately for me, I have good friends that try to fill that void for me as my children are traveling this year to visit other relatives.  Also, while I believe the reason for the season is to celebrate Jesus' birth, I wish we could all celebrate His birth every day of the year, not just on the 25th of December.  I hope all of you out there in blogland had a wonderful day yesterday filled with many blessings.  And I hope the New Year brings you good health, happiness, and fortune!  Thank you all for your continued support of my tiny blog.  Hugs to you!

Hostess for the week - Peggy of Pantryrevisited.blogspot.com!  That would be me of course. It is always a treat to get to host one of the food groups.  It is not an easy task.   Not for me at least.  I analyze it to death.  How easy will it be to make on a work night?  How accessible are the ingredients to the majority?  How good will it taste?  I figured we would all be turkeed out (is turkeed a word) after Thanksgiving and might like a welcome change of just a good, taco salad.  I got some vine ripened tomatoes at the store.  However, they were not as firm as I would have liked.  They did not dice easily. The only change I made to the recipe was I used bottled lime juice instead of fresh. The finished product: My rating.  We thought this was good, but nothing spectacular.  Easy to make, easy on the budget, and tasty.  Definitely worth trying.  Thank you all for cooking with me this week!!...

Hostess for this week:  Bri of Yoshimi vs. motherhood at http://yoshimivsmotherhood.blogspot.com/ Well Thanksgiving is over and what a fabulous week it was!  As most of you already know, I got to multi-task and celebrate my birthday, Thanksgiving and Christmas all in one week.  It was almost too much fun for one body to handle.  Wanted to share this photo with my beautiful flowers that a friend of mine sent me for my birthday.  My son also sent me some lovely autumn flowers.  I cooked a lot during those three days.  I had both my handsome sons home for a day and a half.  We made the most of our time together.  We had a great bowl of chili while we watched the Iron Bowl, then later we had our Thanksgiving feast of turkey, dressing, green beans, deviled eggs, mashed potatoes and corn casserole, with pecan pie and pumpkin cheesecake for dessert.  The next morning we had Ellie's Blueberry Almond French Toast and it was a big...