Our family uses honey as a sweetener in a lot of foods and beverages, so we end up with a lot of those little Honey Bears in our kitchen.  Often, we have quite an assortment in various degrees of “full.”  At just about any time during a typical day, we will have bears lined up on the kitchen counter, tipped precariously on top of each other, trying to consolidate the honey into one or two bears.

The dilemma is that we often end up with crystalized honey, which I know you can disolve in a little hot water, but I’d really prefer to use the honey before it turns to sugar.

I do have a simple fruit salad recipe that my family really enjoys, so I can use some up in that, but I would really like a recipe that uses more honey than a fruit salad.  My simple recipe is just to combine about 2 or 3 tablespoons of honey with about 1/2 cup of sour cream, mix until it’s nice and runny, then pour over any combination of fresh or canned fruit.  Doesn’t get much simpler than that!  I like the tangy flavor of the sour cream mixed with the sweetness of both the honey and the fruit.

Also, honey is a wonderful glaze for baked ham.  Just pour a bunch of honey over your ham as is, or you can spice it up a bit with some mustard, cloves, or whatever you want.  This is a great treat and we enjoy this dinner as often as we can find a good price on ham.

I’d be interested to see if anyone has other recipes using honey that may be a bit more unusual.

Breakfast in our house is often the biggest meal of the day.  If my husband’s cooking, it’s guaranteed.  He likes to fill up a plate to over-flowing with all kinds of his favorite breakfast food staples.  Apparently, he grew up with corned beef hash for breakfast, so now it has found a regular spot on our breakfast menu.

Needless to say, I have many, many cans of corned beef hash in the pantry.  If you visit me often here, you’re aware that my husband is somewhat of a hoarder when it comes to food; especially canned food.  He can fill up the pantry with more canned goods than you can imagine.

If you’re not familiar with corned beef hash, here’s what it is.  Very simply, you’ve got corned beef, which is a salt-cured piece of beef, chopped fine, mixed with finely chopped cooked potatoes, a little onion and seasoning.  That’s it.  Typically, you take this mixture and fry it up nice and crisp in a skillet and serve it alongside some eggs, poached or fried.

Now, there’s got to be other things to make with this staple in our house other than frying it up for breakfast.  I do have one recipe that I found for a hot, oven-baked sandwich.  You just mix the corned beef hash with some onion, celery, green pepper, and chili sauce, and any other spices you like.  Top some English muffins with the mixture and put your open-faced sandwiches in the oven for 10 to 15 minutes until they get hot all the way through.  Pull out the sandwiches, lay a piece of sliced cheese on top and stick back in the oven for a few minutes.  This works really great for a hungry group of kids after school.  The cheese is the selling point.

Has anyone made a whole dinner casserole out of corned beef hash?  I guess that would be my preference if I were to try and use up some of these cans.  I can’t wait to see what you’ve got to say!

My husband made a great crockpot sweet potato dish a few weeks ago which called for about 1/4 cup of shredded coconut.  So, guess what we still have in our refrigerator?  You guessed it.  What’s left of a big bag of shredded coconut.  I’ve been eating it right out of the bag and really need to stop.  It’s not that shredded coconut is so terribly high in calories, but it seems awfully wasteful.  I know there are a lot of fruit salad recipes and such that use coconut, but I’d like to try something a little less sweet or dessert-like.

We do have an all-time favorite shrimp dish that uses coconut.  It’s basically any deep fry coating mix with coconut added to the milk and egg, then either deep fried or oven-fried; the shrimp come out delicious either way.

A simple breakfast meal that we’ve incorporated some coconut into is waffles or pancakes.  That’s always a hit in our house.  We just sprinkle in a bit of coconut in the batter and cook as usual.  A nice touch, too, is to use a fruity syrup instead of maple syrup.  The coconut really goes well with peach syrup.  You can make a simple syrup just by boiling the juice that comes out of the can of peaches with a little extra sugar or honey.  Then, chop up the peaches and throw them in the pan.  When you serve the waffles topped with the peach syrup, sprinkle a little coconut on top.  It’s really a special treat that way.

As far as using up a lot of shredded coconut, I’m stumped.  I simply can’t picture using layers of coconut in a main dish of any kind.  But, I know there has to be some recipe out there that is tried-and-true.  I’d love to hear from you!

If you live in a warm and humid climate, this becomes a problem.  I keep my brown sugar in the refrigerator to avoid the bugs that are a part of life in the south, but the humidity in the refrigerator turns my brown sugar to a solid brick.  I try to put it in supposedly “air tight” containers, but that doesn’t seem to help that much.  I’ve taken to buying smaller amounts at a time just to try and use it up before it turns rock solid.

I don’t really bake that much, but would be tempted if I could find recipes that use a large amount of brown sugar, but most of the recipes I see use more white sugar than brown sugar.  So, I’m back to trying to figure out how to use up my brown sugar faster.

We grill out a lot and, when salmon fillets are available at our local fish market, I like to make a sweet sauce using brown sugar to serve with it.  It’s a very simple recipe, which I’ll share here.

Whisk together until the sugar dissolves:

1/4 cup packed brown sugar
2 Tbsp. Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp. freshly grated ginger
1/2 Tbsp. lemon juice
1/2 Tbsp. olive oil

Cook salmon according to your grill’s directions, but wait to put the sauce on until the fish won’t be flipped again, just putting it on the side that’s up, so the sugar doesn’t come in contact with the cooking grate and burn.

As you can see, I’m not using up much brown sugar in that simple salmon sauce.  It would be great if you would share any recipe you have that uses up a bit more of my brown sugar.  I’m looking forward to your input!

It’s peach season here!  We actually have a farm that we can go to pick our own fresh peaches right from the tree.  This is incredible for us, since we didn’t always have that luxury.

The last time I actually had a lot of fresh peaches was years ago when someone shipped me a box as a gift.  That was some special surprise!  Not only were they a tasty treat, but the aroma when we opened that box was out-of-this-world.  After eating a couple right out of the box, we got to work trying to figure out what to do with them.  We didn’t want the pleasure of those peaches to be over too quickly, so we found a couple really great ways to freeze some of them.  Both these methods are so simple that it almost seems wrong.

Here’s how we did one batch.  Wash the peaches well, cut in half, removing the pit, then slice into wedges.  Lay the wedges in a single layer on a cookie sheet and put it in the freezer until the peaches are frozen solid.  Remove the frozen peach slices from cookie sheet and slip the slices into freezer bag and place bag in freezer immediately.  Because they’re frozen individually you can use whatever amount you want out of the freezer bag, even taking out just one or two wedges to put on top of a bowl of ice cream. They’ll thaw in a minute or two and be ready for you.

One other great way that we froze some of our peaches was in glass canning jars.  We just slipped some of the clean wedges into wide-mouth jars, screwed on the lids, and set them in the freezer.  The canning jars ensured that they would not become freezer-burned if we left them in there longer than anticipated.  It was a real treat to find a jar of those frozen peaches hiding in the freezer a year after we received that box of fresh peaches.  We thawed them out and they were as good as the first day.

Now, we did not add sugar to our peaches so that they would be “recipe ready” for pies and cobblers.  If you’re thawing a couple wedges just for a treat, you can sprinkle the peaches with sugar once they thaw.

Anyone have a good peach pie, cobbler, or crisp recipe to share?  Are there other uses for peaches besides dessert?  I’d love to hear from you!

Okay, trick question.  I don’t suppose there is much you can actually “make” with sardines, but how would you serve them if, say, you had dozens of tins of the little guys in your pantry?  Rather than eating them on crackers every night for a month or more, how would you get rid of them?

Not that I don’t like sardines, it’s just that I have so many of them!  Seems my husband was preparing for hurricane season again, and went overboard on the canned sardines.  I still insist that, when we are left without electricity or water for a week, the last thing we’re going to want to eat will be sardines, but he can’t see my logic.  So, here I am with my pile of sardines, hoping someone has a brilliant dish to make that will use up some of these tasty treats.

I’m actually tempted to try mashing them up with some olive oil and balsamic vinegar, maybe a little lemon juice, and use them to make an antipasto dressing for penne pasta and olives.  Does that sound good?  They can’t be that much different than using anchovies or anchovy paste, can they?

Anyway, just a thought.  I’d be happy to hear from anyone out there that has a solution to my dilemma, hopefully before my husband stocks up for the next hurricane season!

This may seem a bit odd, but I often have chicken livers in the house because my husband is a real fan.  Almost every week I open the refrigerator and see that he’s been to the store again and has brought home another big container of chicken livers.

Now, I like his oven-fried chicken livers just fine, but he insists on using shortening in the pan so that the livers get nice and crispy.  Well, he’s right… they do get nice and crispy, but I really don’t want to eat that shortening stuff anymore.  I like chicken livers, even crave them sometimes, so I really need a dish to make that is different, and possibly healthier.

Borrowing from my past again, I do remember one delightful dish my Dad used to make for us when Mom wasn’t around to see, smell, or hear about it.  (Mom was not a fan of chicken livers, to say the least.)  It’s a very simple, but yummy dish.  Let’s see if I can remember Dad’s Chicken Liver Skillet…

1) Saute some diced onion and sliced fresh mushrooms in some butter until the mushrooms are cooked all the way and even a bit crispy.
2) Slice the livers into thin pieces and add them to the hot skillet.
3) Saute everything together for a couple minutes until the liver is thoroughly cooked.
4) Pour in some beer or chicken broth, so you can loosen up the good browned bits stuck to the skillet and have a little sauce.
5) Let it simmer just until the liquid reduces a little and it gets nice and bubbly all together.
6) Put a piece of buttered toast on each plate, and spoon a portion of the liver mixture over the top.  Add a little salt and black pepper now if you want.

This is not a dish every kid would like, but we were kind of adventurous with well-developed tastebuds!

If you have any fun chicken liver dishes that you like and remember fondly, or even not so fondly, I’d love to have you share them.

When I was growing up, we had a big vegetable garden.  This was way up north, so each year, without fail, our garden would fall victim to at least one early frost.  This frost would easily wipe out all the tomatoes that were still trying to ripen on the vine.  Rather than lose all the tomatoes left hanging, we would pick all the tomatoes including the green ones.  So, here we were with green tomatoes all over the house, hoping they’d eventually ripen.

Of course, some would ripen, but most would not.  My Mom became quite adept at creating ways to cook and eat those green tomatoes.  Fried Green Tomatoes is popular in many households, but one of our family favorites still to this day is a Green Tomato and Pork Chop Bake.  I now actually buy green tomatoes just to make this dish.  Here’s how I throw it together:

1 – Slice onions and green tomatoes into thin circles, enough to cover the bottom of your baking dish.
2 – Grease the baking dish and lay onions in, then green tomatoes, adding salt and pepper to both layers.
3 – Brown the pork chops nicely and lay them on top of the onions and green tomatoes.
4 – Cover and bake for an hour at 350 degrees, or until the pork chops are cooked all the way through.

It’s a simple dish, but you can spice it up more if you want, even topping the pork chops with some diced red tomatoes.  Try sprinkling a little curry over the vegetables for something really different.

Does anyone have a great recipe for using up your own green tomatoes?  They really are a nice way to add a great tangy and super-fresh flavor to a lot of dishes.  If you’d care to share your favorites, I’d love to hear about them.