COMFORT FOOD RECIPES

 

 Below, a photo Cassidy posted to the family loop, stating it was CABE visiting Orlando Airport. My question: "What's CABE?" Here is Cassidy's reply:

Collegiate Aviation Business Executives. Our club is to help students learn about other sides of aviation including airport planning, operations, management, consulting, etc. Most students are flight students (as 75% of the collegiate aeronautics is) and they hope to figure out their Plan B.

 

The family searched the photo in vain for Cassidy. Turns out, she took it. With a Delta flight landing dead center in the background, of course she did. But I managed to get another photo out of her.

 

Cassidy, Orlando International, 9/26

 Riley, Cassidy's older (middle) sister was airborne this week, traveling to Ohio for the wedding of her boyfriend's cousin (thanks to Donald's father's job producing umpteen "frequent flyer" miles). Photo below from the reception.

 The granddaughter of family friends did something even more adventurous recently:  participating in Florida's annual Alligator Hunt.

Jada and the Gator (10' 1")

 

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 TWO COMFORT-FOOD RECIPES

 Both recipes are from a little book titled, Back to School (published by Taste of Home in 2015.) Special Note: Ignore the title. Everyone needs Comfort Food.

 

  

Mexican Beef Cobbler

1½ lbs. ground beef

1 envelope Taco seasoning mix

1 jar (16 oz.) salsa

1 can (8-3/4 oz.) whole kernel corn, drained

2 cups (8 oz.) shredded sharp cheddar cheese

1½ cups biscuit/baking mix*

½ cup milk

1/8 teaspoon freshly ground pepper.

 

*Translate:  Bisquick 

 Special note from Taste of Home:  Add whatever  you like to make this your own—black beans, sour cream, chipotle peppers in adobo or even guacamole!

 Preheat oven to 350°. 

1. In a large skillet, cook beef over medium heat for 8-10 minutes or until no longer pink, breaking into crumbles. Stir in taco seasoning, salsa, and corn. Heat through. Transfer to 11 x 7 baking dish. Sprinkle with cheese.

2.  In a small bowl, mix biscuit mix and milk just until blended. Drop by tablespoonfuls over cheese. Sprinkle with pepper.

3.  Bake dish, uncovered, at 350° for 35-45 minutes or until bubbly and topping is golden brown.

 

Pizza Pockets 

 

1 can (15 oz.) tomato sauce

1 can (6 oz.) tomato paste

1 teaspoon dried basil

½ teaspoon garlic salt

¼ teaspoon each, onion powder and sugar

1 tube (11 oz.) refrigerated thin pizza crust

1½ cups shredded mozzarella cheese

Optional toppings:  pepperoni, sausage, bacon, green pepper, pineapple, olives, and/or mushrooms

1. Preheat oven to 425°. In a small bowl, mix the first six ingredients. 

2. Unroll pizza crust. Cut into 16 squares. Press squares into bottom and up the sides of 16 ungreased muffin cups, allowing corners to hang over the edge. (This will take two standard cupcake pans.)

3. Spoon 1 tablespoon sauce mixture into each cup. Top with cheese. Add toppings as desired. Bake 10-12 minutes* or until crust is golden brown. Serve remaining sauce with pizza pockets. 

*May take longer, depending on the amount of toppings 

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Way, way back in Ages Dark—more precisely, the summer I turned four, we moved to the tiny town of Wellfleet on Cape Cod—my father's first job after getting his Masters in Education from Harvard. It was love at first sight. Even though my father took a better-paying job the next year, we returned to Cape Cod every summer, my parents finally retiring there . . . until one day I got a letter from my father saying, "Your mother just came in, all excited. She saw a car go by on the road outside."

It turned out Cape Cod, so lively in summer, was a wasteland in the winter. Which is how my parents began to "winter" in Venice, Florida, which led to my family moving there some fifteen or so years later.

All of which leads to this week's Book of the Week.

Love at Your Own Risk is my only contemporary romance for Kensington before the line was shut down about the same time Signet shut its Regency line. (Both too squeaky clean for the sudden interest in books so hot they verged on erotica.) Just how squeaky clean is demonstrated by my being told my book would be re-titled He Said, She Said, as Marketing didn't think "Risk" would play well in the hinterlands. Naturally, when I got my rights back and published it myself, I used the original title. 

I hope you will enjoy my sole book set on Cape Cod—the "research" came straight out of a plethora of memories (plus living in the New Haven area for a quarter century.) 

 

 

Following a tough trial, all defense attorney Vicki Kent wants is a few days of peace and quiet at her parents' cottage on Cape Cod. Instead, she finds a man challenging her with a 9mm in his hand. John Paollilo is an angry, burned-out homicide detective from New Haven, exiled by his boss to an enforced vacation on the Cape. Needless to say, conflicts abound—from a clash of professional viewpoints to the odoriferous retaliations of a family of skunks—as Vicki and John reluctantly share the cottage, exploring the Cape and each other, and in the end discovering that opposites really do attract.

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 For a link to Blair's website & editing info, click here. 

For Archives, see the menu on the right. 

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Politics (from Australia) - No Holds Barred

 

Manatees, Blue Springs State Park

 

Myakka River St Pk - Photo by Joe Saladino

Susie's photo of this week's Eclipse, Sanford FL

 

I hope you can read the following - it's a compilation of some of the greatest Opening Lines in the history of Fiction.

 

Last, and most important, a 9/11 pic I had not seen before. Whether you are like me—old enough to have 9/11 imprinted on your mind forever—or too young to recall one of the most momentous events in American history, this image memorializing all the firefighters who died trying to rescue people from the Twin Towers is truly moving.

 The Death Toll, according to one Internet source:

World Trade Center - 2,753

Pentagon - 184

Shanksville, PA where passengers crashed the third suicide plane) - 40 (not counting the 4 hijackers)

Plus the thousands who were sickened and the many who died from toxic gases inhaled that day

Franklin Delano Roosevelt described the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) as "A day that will live in Infamy." On September 11, 2001, a second horrifying day joined the List. 

May God bless all who died, the injured, the survivors, and their families. So many went "above and beyond" that day. May there never be another such incident to add to the list.

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 I have been saving the article below for about six weeks, waiting for the primaries to be over, the Mid-terms to loom large. Also, so we could enjoy summer before facing harsh reality. But now, alas, the time has come. And the Aussie who wrote the following really "tells it like is."

Australian's Comment on Trump, 2026

IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE TODAY ….READ THIS! WOW!   [comment from the person who shared the article on Facebook]

This Australian's reply to Trump's rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.
"Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth."
Copied from David Abbruzzese via Buddy Richard
REMOVE THE RAPIST, MURDERER!!                   Pedo !!  

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  BOOK OF THE WEEK:

Although "Gamble" has been Book of the Week in the not-too-distant past, it's my only novel which features Politics. The library in Venice, FL, was an enormous help, ordering a very serious, if dry, book on British Elections Before 1834 from the UCF library. Without it, I could never have written this book. Believe me, the truly odd Election practices are factual. Which is why the elections laws were seriously reformed in 1834. I have to admit A Gamble With Love is among my favorites. There's always something especially intriguing about marriages of convenience—in Fiction, if not in Reality! 

Miss Aurelia Trevor has a problem. Until she reaches the age of twenty-five, she will have no control over her beloved Pevensey Park, and by that time her unscrupulous uncle will have run it into the ground. Marriage to someone other than her uncle's leering son is her only way out, but, one by one, she rejects the men on her list of suitors. In desperation, Aurelia does the unthinkable. She hires a solicitor to find her a husband strong enough to stand up to both her uncle and her cousin. And soon learns the truth of that old adage: Be careful what you wish for.

Thomas Lanning is a man of the City. Unlike Aurelia, who stands to inherit vast land and wealth, he has made his own place in the world. He is not at all tempted by the suggestion of marriage to an heiress, but other considerations, such as a power base for a seat in Parliament, tweak his interest. Plus an unexpected twinge of chivalry when he hears the full extent of Miss Trevor's difficulties with her uncle and his family.

Aurelia, who only wants to live in peace on her acres, finds she has acquired a ready-made family in Thomas's younger sister and brother, as well as a head-strong husband whose campaign for MP fills her household with a shockingly odd assortment of characters. It seems her marriage of convenience is fast becoming a marriage of inconvenience. Just how far will this strong-willed pair bend to accommodate each other? And will they do it before it's too late?

Reviews:

"Blair Bancroft's warm and tender [novel] boasts a great heroine in Aurelia: She's attractive, courageous, vulnerable and intelligent."  Robin Taylor, Romantic Times

"Reading how they gradually learn to like and eventually love each other is wonderful. Blair Bancroft is now definitely one of my favorite traditional Regency authors and this book is a prime example of why."  Nicole Hulst, Romance Junkies

"Set against a backdrop of rural politics (and a fascinating look at the early world of "buying votes) this is a story that entrances, enlightens and endears."  Celia at A Romance Review

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 For a link to Blair's website & editing info, click here. 

For Archives, see the menu on the right. 

 For recent blogs, scroll down.