I love traditions… especially around the holidays. At Thanksgiving we always have my late-grandma’s banana cream and chocolate cream pie. These buttery dinner rolls have been gracing our Thanksgiving table for years. With every new marriage, child born and merger of families, new traditions are brought in to the fold. The traditions around our holiday table are both rich with family history and valued by everyone.

With that said, there are times when breaking tradition is totally ok. For example, a smaller Thanksgiving gathering might not require a giant turkey to be roasted. Instead, maybe grilling up some BBQ Turkey Legs might be a better option. These Grilled BBQ Turkey Legs made with KC Masterpiece Hickory Brown Sugar Barbecue Sauce are just the nudge you need for breaking away from tradition, just a little bit. They are so good, you will never miss your traditional roasted turkey!

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I always get a chuckle when people say that Labor Day is the official end of grilling season. Anyone who believes that doesn’t know my husband. I’ve known him to be out manning our ghetto grill in 3 feet of snow. A little cooler weather isn’t going to stop us from enjoying some of our favorite grilled foods! …

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I’m sharing a perfectly simple grilled side dish over on The Mushroom Channel blog today!

Click HERE to get the recipe for Marinated Grilled Mushrooms — a must have side dish for the summer grilling season!

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One of the difficult things about being a food blogger, and when I say difficult I mean that in the loosest of terms, is remembering that not all things you cook have to be new and exciting. It is okay to revisit some old favorites every now and then.

Don’t you find that to be true as you are planning your menus? You want to have something new to blog about, so you fill up your menu with recipes you haven’t tried before in order for you to have some new content for your blog. Pretty soon, some of the recipes you love that you had blogged about before are buried under the pile of new recipes and you soon forget they even existed.

This weekend, I planned my menu for this week but was stumped as to what to have on Sunday night. I sent a shout out into the wonderful world of Twitter for meal ideas when the lovely Melanie, from Southern Comfort in a Northern Life, said she was making a recipe I had on my blog years ago for Grilled Pork Chops with Garlic Lime Sauce. Intrigued, because I honestly forgot about that recipe, I went to check out my very own blog to see what she was referring to. Sure enough. I saw the recipe for Grilled Pork Chops with Garlic Sauce and instantly remembered how much we had loved it!

Take this as a gentle reminder that newer isn’t always better. Don’t ignore your archives. Sometimes, a treasure that you may have forgotten about awaits you!

Pork Chops with Garlic Lime Sauce (Originally from Epicurious.com)

1/4 cup fresh lime juice
1 garlic clove, minced
1/4 teaspoon dried hot red-pepper flakes
1/3 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
6 (1/2-inch-thick) boneless pork chops

Whisk together lime juice, garlic, red-pepper flakes, and 1/4 teaspoon salt, then add oil in a slow stream, whisking well. Whisk in cilantro.

Prepare a gas grill for direct-heat cooking over medium-high heat. Pat pork dry and season with salt and pepper. Oil grill rack, then grill pork chops, covered, turning over once, until just cooked through, 5 to 6 minutes total. Serve drizzled with some vinaigrette, and with remainder on the side.

Cooks’ note: If you aren’t able to grill outdoors, chops can be cooked in a hot lightly oiled large (2-burner) ridged grill pan over moderately high heat.

Makes 4 servings.

Gourmet
July 2007

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I do not deal well with rejection. Honestly, who does? I have yet to meet a person who actually likes rejection. Some sales people feed off of rejection and it pushes them to try harder, but I really doubt that they actually enjoy being rejected.

This week I started sending my resume out for a new job that I can do from home. This is the first time I have had to do the whole resume thing in my entire 12 year career. I created a resume when I graduated from college and landed a nice little job in the Human Resources / Staffing field. From then on out, the jobs I have had have been based on referrals from other people. New opportunities have just landed in my lap and I have been blessed because of them. Even once my first child was born and I decided to become a stay at home mom, opportunities came forth in the recruiting field that enabled me to be a stay at home mom while earning a bit of money on the side. As of this past January, I ended up resigning from my home based recruiting position because being on the phone so much was becoming too difficult with three very loud children in the background. It is hard to remain professional when you have a toddler tugging on your leg to hold her, or a three year old wanting to talk to whomever you are trying to hold a professional conversation with.

The problem is…we are really missing the money I was making. My husband referred to the fund that we put the money into as an “Oh Shit” fund while I referred to it as an “Ocean” fund. The contribution I made helped to pay the bills, but it also allowed us to play more… go on dates, vacations, buy higher quality ingredients for recipes I was trying out, etc.

I know I could return in a heartbeat to my recruiting job working from home again, but I need a change. My life has changed and the dynamics at home have changed. My number one reason for being at home is my children and, wishful thinking, I need a job that will not be a huge interference in my family life (I know…me and every other SAHM in the universe is wishing for just that!). That leads us to me branching out on my own…networking, sending out resumes, and facing the rejection that is sure to come.

One area I rarely get rejected in is with cooking. The kitchen is my domain and no matter what I make I typically have at least one grateful person on the receiving end of my trials. Sometimes, with those kitchen disasters, it has been our dog…but even then he would gobble up whatever I ruined with his tail wagging and a twinkle in his eye. I rarely feel rejected in the kitchen which is why I think I feel so comfortable there. I know that no matter what, the kitchen will always feel like my safe haven away from the world.

For a hit of your own and to feel accepted in the kitchen, give this recipe from the August 2007 issue of Gourmet magazine a try. Not a hint of rejection will be felt after you watch your recipients lick their plates clean.

Gourmet
July 2007

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Isn’t it funny how marriage has its peaks and valleys? I am happily married. I married a wonderful man who works extremely hard every day away from home to provide for us. When he comes home, he happily shares in the housework, the cooking, the taking care of the kids, etc. I am spoiled and blessed all at once.

Even though I do consider myself to be happily married, there are times when my husband and I can’t stand each other. We get in those moods where every little thing the other one does bugs the heck out of each other. My husband, for example, likes to finish whatever I am doing. If I have a pot on the stove simmering something and the lid is supposed to stay on during the entire time, he comes into the kitchen and takes over…lifting the lid and stirring the pot. He thinks he is being helpful when really he doesn’t understand that I have things completely under control. I, of course, cannot imagine anything that I could possibly do to annoy him. OK – well maybe the beating him up in the middle of the night gets annoying, but besides that I am really the non-annoying one out of the two of us. (Kidding, of course!)

At times, we are annoyed with each other. Those times I will call our valleys. Then we have our peaks. The past few weeks we have been on a really high peak. Everything is clicking. We are communicating, loving, having fun, and enjoying each others company. The kids are happy, we are happy and things are just going swell.

We just came off of a wonderful weekend. We did not do anything overly special. We just spent a lot of time together…shopping, working around the house, going to the pool, watching movies after the kids went to bed and cooking. Yes… we did a lot of great cooking over the weekend.  Cooking is something we do really well together and it is one of my favorite things to do with my husband. We made a lot of delicious dishes over the weekend, but one of the things we made stood out because of its simplicity. The dish that stood out was not overly complicated at all… in fact it was a simple recipe.  We decided to try this recipe after sitting together on the couch, pouring over the August 2007 issue of Food & Wine magazine. We were looking through it together and were bookmarking recipes we wanted to try. It just so happened that we needed a quick idea for lunch, and the recipe for Grilled Chicken Sandwiches with Mozzarella, Tomato and Basil  jumped out at us. What made these sandwiches delicious was the marriage of great ingredients that might not taste great alone, but put together are wonderful. Ingredients that blend well together to make a great tasting, yet not complicated, sandwich…. very similar to a good marriage. Two people who are better together than they are apart and while together, create a full life, where the peaks outweigh the valleys and the valleys make the peaks all the more better.

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