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!

One of my favorite summer dishes is sliced tomatoes with mozzarella and fresh basil leaves. Every few weeks throughout the summer, I’ll grab a bundle of basil at the grocery store to make this yummy simple salad. The problem is that I only end up using a small portion of the basil. I store the rest in the fridge in some moist paper towels, but I don’t really know what else to make with it. I’ll sprinkle some in pasta sauce, but that’s about it. I usually end up throwing the wilting leaves out before I have a chance to make the tomato basil salad again.

Any ideas on what else I can make with fresh basil?

My five year old has been very interested in plants and how they grow lately so we started a little planting experiment. We planted some watercress since it’s easy and fast to grow. In fact, its’ too easy and I have a huge amount of these yummy little plants sitting in a pot on my kitchen counter.

I like to sprinkle some fresh watercress on my salad, but other than that I honestly don’t know what to do with these. Any ideas or recipes that call for watercress? Please post them as a comment below.

I was craving a Mojito the other day and thought how much fun it would be to grow mint leaves so I could make one for guests. Of course, my husband says “What else can you make with mint?” and I said “… uhhh….”

So, here I am again. Other than Mojitos what can I make with fresh mint leaves? Do you have a recipes or idea for us?

Oh, and here’s one recipe for Mojitos in case you were curious…

1 part rum
3 parts club soda
12 fresh mint leaves
1/2 fresh lime (not one of those plastic ones)
sugar

Place the mint leaves, lime, and sugar in a glass. Crush them with a pestle.

Add rum, and top off with the club soda. Stir well.

You can garnish this drink with a mint sprig and lime wedge.

Optional: Try different kinds of rum. Lemon, Orange, Melon, Raspberry, Apple, ect.

It seems that everyone uses dip mix. I’ve managed to accumulate quite the collection of dip mixes. (Ranch, jalapeno, Mexican, etc.) Finally I figured out some uses — and I’ll post them below.

What do you do with dip packets other than make DIP?

I have splurged once and bought some saffron. It was like $13 for a few little threads. What was I thinking? Now I have this stuff and don’t know what to do with it.

It looks just like yellow threads and I know it came from the center of some exotic flower. But, what the heck can I make with SAFFRON?

Sage is one of those spices in this house that goes stale before it’s even had a chance to season our foods. It smells heavenly, but … I just have no idea what to do with it.

Help! What can I make with SAGE?