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05 Feb 2023

In the Kitchen

The Skinny on Our Recipes

Open cookbook

For the record, I am not a nutritionist. Nor do I consider myself highly qualified to give anyone advice on what or how much to eat. I only know what works for Tom and me. I’m happy to share, but don’t take everything I say as gospel. If you have health concerns or are seriously following a diet, check with a doctor or professional before following my advice.

Our recipes come from a variety of sources. Many are recipes we have collected through the years that were either passed down from relatives and friends or clipped from magazines. Some are recent concoctions that work for the two of us. Others were found online and, most recently, on Facebook and Pinterest.

When it comes to our recipes, it’s not always cooking for two. Many of our recipes are family favorites—the key word here being family. Our extended family and circle of friends was large, and we entertained often. Also, I was the mother of two active kids who had friends who were always stopping by and staying for dinner. Though I made an honest attempt here to scale the family recipes down, but it wasn’t always possible or practical, so I gave up on the idea. In truth, some dishes are simply better made with enough to feed a family of four or more. They taste great the second day, and having leftovers sitting in the fridge with the flavors blending is oftentimes a plus. If you want to re-scale, be my guest. There is a handy tool at My Kitchen Calculator. Keep in mind that scaling up or down doesn’t only mean changing the ingredients. You also need to change the size of pots and pans and rethink cooking times. When re-scaling, you might need to experiment once or twice for a dish to turn out as good as the original.

Yields, serving sizes, and prep/cook times are all approximate. I don’t know how it is for anyone else, but if I ask family members “How much?” or “How long?” I always get a generic, “It will make a big pot” and “takes about an hour.” I leave it at that. I’m not inclined to interrogate. As far as prep/cook times go, I don’t necessarily pay attention to how long it takes to prep ingredients and then cook them. I’m more concerned with the total time you actually need, from start to finish, to get a meal on the table. If I make a dish and do try logging the time myself, I invariably get a phone call or there’s some other distraction that throws my whole concentration off. Also, having me measure out cupfuls in an attempt to determine the true yield and/or serving size for a recipe is not going to happen. Bottom line—this is not a cooking website. I am not Julia Child nor Martha Stewart. I am just an empty nester sharing recipes for meals we enjoy. Period.

Once upon a time, I included nutritional facts with our recipes and tried to be super accurate. Now, not so much. The tool I use is at Calorie Count—you enter the number of servings and ingredients for any recipe and analyze the recipe for its nutritional value. Fabulous, helpful tool for those of us who want to eat healthier. I can’t guarantee that the calories or other nutritional facts are accurate, but I believe them to be close. They could, however, be off by 1 or 100 calories. I don’t check or double check for accuracy. Again, just because you can type in numbers and get nutritional facts, it doesn’t mean you should necessarily trust those facts to lose weight or use them if you are on a restrictive diet for health reasons. Check with your doctor. I can’t stress this enough.

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Patricia and TomHi there! Tom and I are two empty nesters who decided to downsize and simplify our lives—lose the clutter and drama, travel a little, laugh a lot, sit back, and enjoy the simple pleasures life has to offer. Read more

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