Silly midwest girl

I am probably one of the whitest people you were ever meet. According to my OB, while examining me during my first pregnancy, I have the whitest stomach she had ever seen. I grew up in Ohio, the land of meat and potatoes. A land where cucumbers and zucchini were the stuff of nightmares, plant one small plant and they give you 5000 of each. So what in the world am I doing sharing my version of Asian Cucumber Salad? Well, why not?

I had my first experience with Thai food when I moved to Seattle in 1995. My first experience did not thrill me. My second experience won me over. That experience included cucumber salad. Then I found a teriyaki place that also had wonderful cucumber salad. And I was hooked.

Now that I have two kids, I don't eat out very often. And when I do, it's usually some place where the kids can be very loud and no one will notice. And cucumber salad isn't on the menu. One day I decided to find a recipe to use the cucumber that had come in my bi-weekly deliver from Full Circle Farm. I found a number of them out there, but none of them alone called out to me. So I combined a few. And then promptly forgot what I had done. That was actually part of the motivation for creating this blog, to help me remember recipes like this one.

Tally me banana

I hate bananas. I love banana bread. Specifically I love banana nut bread. But then I married a man that hates nuts in his banana bread. Well, he hates nuts in most everything. It almost broke us. I mean really, first the salt vs pepper and then nuts vs no nuts. And really, a man who doesn't love nuts marrying me? Just makes no sense.

My grandmother made amazing banana nut bread. I still have a recipe card of hers with her recipe. My mother in law makes great banana bread. In a cookbook she made for my bridal shower, she shared her recipe for banana bread. Her recipe came from another family friend. And guess what. The recipes are the same. Well, except for the missing nuts.

My guess is that in 1957 Better Housekeeping had this recipe that "every modern housewife" needed to make to keep her husband happy. I know in my house it has worked.  And how do we resolve the nuts vs no nuts problem? I make two loaves of course. For awhile after having a child with peanut allergies, I gave up the nut version of this recipe, but then I found peanut free walnuts. Husband and son get no nut, myself and daughter get nut version. And now it requires four loaves rather than two.

So with nods to my grandma and my mother in law and whomever originally created it, I give you Banana (Nut) Bread.

Sloppy Joe's...Slop...Sloppy Joe's

It seems only appropriate that I start with sloppy joe's as my first post (and a nod to Adam Sandler). Sloppy joe's is one of the first "meals" I remember cooking for myself. And it was my favorite meal. I would go to my grandmother's on Saturday night and she'd let me cook. After dinner I'd stay up much too late to watch Carol Burnett. It was wonderful.

The meal would start by my grabbing a potato and cubing it. I'd then fry it up. In another pan, I'd brown the ground beef and add bbq sauce straight from the jar. It was pure heaven. For 30+ years, this is how I have made sloppy joe's. Of course, Hunt's Manwhich came out and I tried that for awhile, but I like my sloppy joe's to be a true BBQ beef.

When I met my husband, I found he also loved sloppy joes as just ground beef and bbq sauce. If I added onions or peppers, he would tolerate it, but he truly preferred the purity. I've used from the jar as well as homemade BBQ sauce, but always stayed simple. And since Lucy adores BBQsauce on pretty much everything, she was actually tricked into eat beef on occassion.

When I saw this recipe for sloppy joes on Pioneer Woman, I knew I had to try it. It had a number of interesting flavors that called out to me. Last night, I pulled it out and gave it a shot. She did something I've never done before, cooked the ground beef in butter. I think it actually made the beef "less dry" but that could be my imagination.