cooking
Italian Meatballs
These dairy-free meatballs are delicious. This is a large recipe and perfect for stocking your freezer with healthy, great-tasting freezer meals.
On busy days, I often wish we would eat take-out for dinner. I used to buy Chinese food because it seemed to have less dairy, but now since we have a little one with a soy allergy as well as dairy, Chinese is not a good option either.
Instead, I try to keep some quick and easy meals in the freezer. Continue reading
Easy Moist Cake (Using a Cake Mix)
The secret ingredient of these moist cakes isn’t pudding mixes or dairy. The secret ingredient is grated zucchini. The zucchini melts away into the cake so you can’t even tell it is in there.
My five-year-old has a summer birthday. I thought he wanted a chocolate cake and started grating zucchini for a chocolate zucchini cake, but he picked out a boxed spice cake mix. Since I already grated zucchini, I decided it was time to experiment. Continue reading
Roasted Yellow Summer Squash
I love the end of summer and all the fresh produce and vegetables. This is a great way to eat yellow summer squash. 
Wash and cut the squash into sticks. Place on parchment-lined baking pan. Drizzle with oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake at 400º F for 30 minutes. Let cool and enjoy.
Zucchini Time
After being away from my garden for a week, I came back to find my zucchini plants loaded with overgrown zucchini. Zucchini is one of my favorite vegetables, if it is possible to narrow it down. It is so mellow, versatile, and plentiful. I’m loving the zucchini season.
Growing up, my dad loved telling a joke about tourists that came to visit their friend in Idaho one summer. The Idaho host takes the visitors to Yellowstone Park and they stop and visit Old Faithful. The visitors are about to lock the doors to the car, but the host tells them Continue reading
Easy Pasta with Fresh Herbs
Whole wheat pasta tossed in olive oil and served with fresh herbs and tomatoes.
When your life circumstances change, sometimes the best way to thrive is to adapt and change. When I realized that it wouldn’t work to eat dairy, I decided I needed to change the way I cook and learn to like foods that weren’t full of dairy.
When I was a kid, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese was part of my regular diet. Continue reading
Adventures with Cherries
Sweet cherries are in season. Here are some of my cherry dessert attempts and winner.
The first summer my husband and I were married, we knew someone who knew someone who had sweet cherry trees. That someone had more cherries than they wanted, and since we loved cherries, we were invited to come and pick cherries from their tree. We were having fun, and ended up picking gallons of cherries. Continue reading
Chicken Dumplings with Vegetables
Shredded chicken, carrots, potatoes, zucchini, and cannelloni beans in chicken broth with small dumplings.
Three weekends ago, the temperatures went from the high 90s to the high 60s. My husband and two oldest children had planned to hike the nearby mountain peak. One thing they didn’t count on was the time of day that the high temperature would occur. It happened to be at 8:00 in the morning. They left at 6:00 AM for their 10 mile hike. By 8:30 AM, it started to drizzle. Continue reading
Replacing Butter
When I first found out that I could no longer eat dairy products, I didn’t know how to replace butter with other products. Non-dairy fats are sometimes hard to find at stores, or are very expensive, or they don’t taste at all like butter. I needed a fat source that the entire family could eat, fit my budget, and tasted good. I learned that with a little creativity I could cook without butter and still have delicious food.
