An easy appetizer with an elegant appearance, tiny potato halves stuffed with smoked salmon in a sour cream & horseradish sauce. If you love lox and bagels, you'll love this quick appetizer! This appetizer recipe is so quick and easy
that I'm adding it to a special collection of easy summer recipes
published throughout the summer of 2009.
With a free e-mail subscription, you'll never miss a one!
"Let the skie raine Potatoes," for what would we be 
without you — lost in a sea of fried turnips, 
mashed beets, roasted parsnips?
~ excerpt from Ode to the Potato
by poet Barbara Hamby via Writer's Almanac The poor potato, loved and devoured, avoided and even reviled. When I visited the St Paul farmers market a couple of years ago, the stands held dozens of potato varieties, all sizes and colors and nubbly shapes. More and more, I realize how our industrialized food system cheats us, especially, of variety. Tiny bites of potato start with – no surprise – tiny po…

Everybody's doing it. And I'm doing it too. Won't you fry bread, too? (Hint: It's soo worthwhile!) This 'recipe' (can Fried Bread even be called a recipe?) is so quick and easy
that I'm adding it to a special collection of easy summer recipes
published throughout the summer of 2009.
With a free e-mail subscription, you'll never miss a one!
“Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. Let's do it, let's fall in love.” 
 ~ Cole Porter So everybody IS doing it, frying bread, that is, and loving it too.Julia Child does it. In the new hit movie Julie & Julia, she sizzles bread in a heavy cast-iron skillet. Mattie Ross in True Grit does it. “The ‘corn dodgers’ were balls of what I would call hot-water cornbread. … [Rooster Cogburn] sliced up some of the dodgers and fried them in grease. Fried bread! That was a new dish to me.”Uncle Ronnie does it. “I never use a toaster anymore!” My own dad does it. “I didn’t know anybody in the last 150 y…

Are your kids back to school this week? Here's a way to give a after-school 'hug' – with homemade gum drop cookies, just the way like my mom did for my sister and me. They are sweet and chewy with jewel-colored chunks of spicy gum drops. The year my sister started kindergarten, my mom wrote here in Kitchen Parade, “It sure is quiet around the house these mornings. Even the dog looks forlorn now that the big orange monster has carried off both her children.”In her own childhood, Mom and her siblings often arrived home from school to a warm kitchen and fresh cookies. For her, after-school aromas of butter and sugar and spice were a sort of cookie hug that asked, “How was your day?" and made known "I’m glad you’re home!” Even as a working mom, she often baked cookies while waiting for that "big orange monster” school bus to spit us out at the end of the driveway. With flat, gummy rounds tucked like jewel surprises inside the dough, this old recipe for gum drop c…