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Becoming A Daring Dilettante

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What is a Daring Dilettante? A Daring Dilettante is somebody who finds Delight in their activities. Whether they ’re focused on a single passion such as cooking, or many passions such as cooking, writing, hiking and painting. The Daring part comes in when you stop hiding your passions from yourself and admit that you find joy and delight in your favorite activities. On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a “Daring” thing. Admitting that you find joy in cooking, what is the big deal? Admitting that you like to paint? Or hike? Or write? How is this daring, courageous or even hard? Unfortunately, admitting that you find joy in anything these days is practically an act of courage. Finding pleasure in anything, whether it ’s the exotic or the mundane is often criticized by the people around us and in many different ways. A woman who expresses her joy in cooking might hear: “Cooking? You have time for that ? I can barely find time to pick up the take out on the way home from work...
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D.D. and The Search For Balance

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The toughest part about life, whether you are a kid or an adult, is figuring out how to create a balance between the things you have to do, and the things you want to do. Mostly because what gets mixed up in there are things you think you should do. It can be brutally hard to separate the things you have to do from the things you think   you should do. Knowing what you want to do is generally pretty easy, but you may not get to them because of all the things you have to do and think you have to do get in the way. For example, I want to write my own blog, knit a cable knit hood and start a modest crafting business. I also want to play video games, take long naps, construct the coolest container garden any one in this apartment complex has ever seen and continue to advance at my day job at the Corner of Happy & Healthy. I want to raise my daughter to be courageous, compassionate, strong, generous and independent. The things I have to do are pay the bills, clean the...
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Don't Be Afraid To Experiment!

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Happy day before Mother's Day everybody! Today I wanted to talk for a minute about experimenting in the kitchen. I used to be terrified of the idea of wasting food by having an experiment turn out to be an awful failure. For years I almost never experimented by making up my own spice rub or trying to modify a recipe to suit my tastes. As the years went by though and I read and learned more and more about the art and science that is cooking I became slowly braver. First I started by modifying recipes that I thought were good but could be better. The first recipe I made any real changes to is called "French Canadian Meat Pie" (I love meat pies!) It was published in a Taste of Home Cookbook that I'm not sure I even have anymore. I wrote the recipe down though so I still have that. Anyway, the original version of the recipe was pretty bland as far as my husband and I were concerned so we switched it up by changing out a big portion of the plain ground beef with s...
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Broccoli Casserole Or Making the Most out of your WIC Checks

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This economy is tough. I don’t care what the people on the news say; I haven’t seen an increase in job opportunities. My husband is looking for work and I’m eight months pregnant. Both of us lost our Federal Emergency Unemployment benefits back in December. As a result we are getting by on SNAP benefits and WIC checks and borrowed money from generous relatives. So I’ve been learning how to take full advantage of these benefits. It is not easy. For one thing, WIC checks are very strict and specific. You can only buy specific brands, sizes or types of food. This can be a real shock to the palate if you’ve had the luxury (as we did) of buying almost anything you wanted before. Take bread for example. Husband and I used to eat whole grain white bread. WIC checks only pay for 100% whole wheat bread. Not really a bread we like. Beggars can’t be choosers though so we’ve struggled to find ways to use this bread and enjoy it. One of our favorite recipes is a Broccoli Casserole c...
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Flour Substitutions You have a recipe for a delicious cake that uses cake flour, but all you have on hand is all-purpose flour and you just can't go to the store and buy cake flour. What do you do? Or perhaps you have a member in your family diagnosed with Celiac disease, which means she can't eat wheat gluten anymore. What do you do? Quit baking cakes? Or maybe you want to get more whole grains into your diet, so you decide to banish all white flour and white flour products from your kitchen. But your ten year old REALLY wants a cake for her birthday, what do you do? The answer is: make substitutions! While I won't claim that all your recipes will come out just like they used to I will tell you that you can make delicious baked goods by modifying your recipes and using different kinds of flours. In this article I will give you the basic formulas for the flour substitutions I have been asked about the most. Unfortunately, that does not include gluten free changes...
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This beautiful treat is a piece of the pie my fantastic younger sister made for my Bridal Shower back in May of 2007. It was just as tasty as it was gorgeous.
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