Combining 1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice or white vinegar with enough milk to equal 1 cup is a quick and easy way to make sour milk at home. Allow the milk/lemon juice mixture to stand 5 minutes, and the milk should sour and thicken slightly. This homemade sour milk can be used in any and all recipes calling for sour milk and/or buttermilk.

Whatever happened to bologna sandwiches, bag of chips and an apple in the old lunchbox? Early this morning I watched my young neighbor pack lunch for her three school-age children and I was amazed. There were plastic storage bags packed with cherry tomatoes, celery sticks and baby carrots along with a small pack of Ranch dressing. She made wraps using whole-wheat flour tortillas that encased slices of grilled chicken breasts spread with hummus. Apples and grapes were also included. All this was packed in insulated bags to keep everything chilled! I guess I am really old as dirt.

Unlike the rest of my family I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. I can go without desserts, cookies, pies and cakes. I occacionally have a yen for a bowl of good ice cream (preferrably homemade), and a few times a year I gobble up a small bag or two of M&M’s. Well, then a friend (?) recently presented me with several bars of Sharffen Berger chocolates (bittersweet, semisweet, Nibby, and mocha) and I’ve become a chocoholic practically overnight.
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Okra, a popular garden vegetable in south Louisiana, is a good source of vitamin C, beta carotene, niacin, calcium and iron, and is low in calories with a half-cup cooked, without oil or fat, only 30 calories.
That’s good to know and okra can be boiled, smothered, stewed, fried, pickled. Of course, it’s often added to gumbos to thicken it. If you want to try Emeril’s Fried Okra Salad, click on this link:
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After reading Melissa Clark’s piece in today’s New York Times on how efficient her toaster oven is, I had a good chuckle. About three years ago, my husband brought home a toaster oven that he attached to the underside of one of my kitchen cabinets. I looked at it in disdain saying that all it could do was toast bread or bagels. My husband ignored me and went about making his favorite cheese toast. But over the years I’ve found that today’s toaster ovens can do pretty much anything that a conventional oven can except cook in large quantities, which Ms. Clark explains in her feature.
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I go through lots of lipsticks and I didn’t know, until Lorin informed us, that some contain ground beetles. I say yuck too. And another thing about lipsticks—I was perusing the cosmetic counter at a high-end department store and noticed that some lipsticks have been flavored with vanilla, cocoa, and coconut. I don’t know about that. I’ll stick with flavorless I think.

I love the Charleston, South Carolina area and have visited there often. A friend of mine from Greenville and I often exchange notes regarding the Low Country cuisine and how there are many similarities between there and Louisiana. Something that is very curious to me is that they call pilau (pronounced PERloe, PiLOE, or PERloo) and also referred to as red rice. It’s similar, as far as I’m concerned, to jambalaya. Classically, it contains rice, tomatotes, chicken stock and parsley. If one would add chicken and sausage, you would have jambalaya!
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My husband is fighting a summer cold and has been lying in bed moaning and growning for two days now. Today he’s feeling well enough to prop himself in bed with a multitude of pillows with the television remote in hand. I just went to check on him and he spouted off all kinds of facts about Skippy peanut butter. Did you know that Skippy sponsored the Dennis the Menace television show in 1960? And that Skippy has been produced in Little Rock, Akansas since 1977? And hey, Annette Funicello did Skippy commercials on television in 1979? When I asked him what show he was watching, he told me he couldn’t remember. It must be the drugs the doctor put him on.

Last night I splurged! A young fellow visits me several times a year peddling freshly-caught shrimp and he arrived late yesterday afternoon with shrimp that were still kicking1 I couldn’t bear to freeze them so my dinner menu was all about shrimp—grilled shrimp on skewers threaded alternately with fresh pineapple chunks, followed by crunchy-fried ones served on butter hot French bread with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and dabs of homemade remoulade, and finally, perfectly boiled shrimp to dip in mayonnaise kicked up with fresh dill and a few shakes of hot sauce.
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A. “Cookie” Jarvis won in a pizza-eating contest at the New Jersey Tomato Festival by downing more than two pizzas in 10 minutes. I’m just wondering just how big (or little) were those pizzas.