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Cooking My Mother’s Recipes #12

The Christmas Plum Pudding! My childhood Christmas meant many things we called traditions after the fact. We would make our own decorations. Once, my mother made us string popcorn and cranberries because that’s what she did when she was young. Have you tried that? It’s torture. She told us when she was young her father would search high and low to bring each of the four children an orange. This…

The latest on the Nolen life.

The photo was taken in Natchitoches, Louisiana. It’s pronounced Nac.a.desh. The old legend is that there were twin boys born to a native American chief. He wanted to grant each child land. So, Natchitoches was granted land on the east side of the red river and Nacogdoches was granted the land on the west side of the river. Nacogdoches is a town in Texas. Might be more legend than true, but it’s…

Here’s a new website that features my book, and others I recommend from website – SHEPHERD.COM

Do visit the website for more lists of great books! Here’s my list below. The best British books of suspense that will keep you up reading all night By Rebecca Nolen WebsiteInstagramFacebook page Who am I? At twelve, my favorite things to read were the tattered, dog-eared Ellery Queen, or Alfred Hitchcock Mystery magazines my aunt let me borrow. From there I read every Agatha Christie novel…

Cooking My Mother’s Recipes #10

It’s been a while. During the summer of 2018, I went with my friends Denise Ditto Satterfield and her kind husband, Frank, to London, England. It was a research trip for me for my working manuscript, a prequel to Deadly Thyme. Set in 2007 Harrow there is a parallel story set in 1940. And there is a couple of murders. Here are two photos. The first is a picture of me and my Scottish cousins (my…

By Florence Osmund You can write and publish the best book ever written, but if you don’t skillfully promote it, it won’t likely get noticed, or worse yet, it will draw negative attention. But how do you take a full-length novel with all of its characters, plot points, and subplot points and condense it down to a brief sales pitch that is enough to entice a reader to purchase it?

Source: The Art…

Cooking My Mother’s Recipes #9

The above photo is of my youngest brother, Jeff, my mother, and my grandmother in our kitchen. My grandmother was actually the gumbo queen in our family. The photo below looks like it was taken at one of our Christmas open houses.

Gumbo

One of the most iconic recipes in the South is gumbo. The dictionary’s definition of gumbo is “a soup or stew thickened with okra”. I take issue with this for two…

Cooking My Mother’s Recipes ~ Photos

I haven’t been able to sit and share with you all summer although I have been cooking my mother’s recipes. I will be adding more recipes. I thought for today, Labor Day 2018, I would share old photos of my mother and father. The feature photo was taken at their 50th wedding anniversary party.

I’ll start with Grandpa Leask and my Uncle Glenn.

Here’s a photo of my mother chasing geese with her…

Cooking My Mother’s Recipes #8

Ginger Snaps

I wanted to post some photos of my father on this Father’s Day. My mother wouldn’t have been the great cook she was without him. Even when, at the end of his life he couldn’t eat, he looked out at the spread that Thanksgiving day and proclaimed to all the family present, “Your mother is such a wonderful cook!” We had no idea he was so sick. He died two months later.

He was born in…

Cooking My Mother’s Recipes #7

The photo above is of my parents at the completion of their first home. My father built it with his GI low-rate loan. This photo is likely circa 1950.

Spaghetti sauce

I found this recipe dated 1990, but I remember my mother cooking spaghetti sauce long before this. I suppose she always went by “feel” with her ingredients, so must have decided to write it down. This recipe makes a big pot, so have…

Cooking My Mother’s Recipes #2 (Redo)

The feature photo was taken by my mother. I believe it is Christmas of 1962 because my youngest brother is so small. He would have been about sixteen months here. We are sitting on the front porch of the Ave B. house in South Houston.

My mother would often work on recipes over and over again until they were great. The thing about the Rumtopf cake recipe I have in #2 is that this would likely be…

Cooking My Mother’s Recipes #6

My mother in 1928. She was four. This was taken at their home on Randolph St. In Waterloo, Iowa.

The photo on the right is of my father at about the same age. He was born in South Africa. He and his baby sister, and his parents moved to San Antonio, TX when he was seven.

  Cheese Cake

If you’re like me you have a favorite dessert, perhaps two or three favorites. The world is awash with desserts…

Cooking My Mother’s Recipes #5

I’ve posted the photo above from my family tree. The couple are my great-grandparents. They immigrated to Canada from Scotland and then entered the United States and settled in Mason City, Iowa. The girl on the far right is my grandmother, Mary.

Sponge cake

Here is me and my family at the table, probably 1961.

I don’t know if my mother’s recipe for sponge cake was one passed down to her from her…

Cooking My Mother’s Recipes #4

My mother loved to cook but with four children she found herself barely able to manage more than a few tried and true go-to recipes a week. To cut corner and save time she would clip magazine and newspaper recipes to tape into her recipe notebooks.

Here I am…I promised to cook her very own recipes, which are handwritten on 6 x 4 index cards and taped into the same notebook. Today, though I…

Cooking My Mother’s Recipes #3

My earliest recollection of my mother’s cooking was that there was a lot of food and it was good. We often had relatives at dinner. My mother would cook a large meal and we might eat leftovers for a few days after. Sundays after church we would run across the field from the white stucco church building on Spencer Highway in South Houston, and our house an asbestos tiled two bedroom, one bath…

Cooking with My Mother’s Ghost #2

My husband and I would go to my parent’s house at least once a month when our kids were little. My parents didn’t live far from us. Because my mother loved to cook for others she would invite us over for supper more often, like when she had cooked a big meal.  Beginning in the late 90’s I would see a crock jar full of fermenting fruit on her baker’s rack.

  When I asked what it was she said…

What’s going on (or not).

The weather has been in the news here in Houston. This past week we had so much ice the streets of downtown were empty. So when my husband said he was going to the downtown YMCA, I told him I didn’t think it was open. He said the website said it was open. He went. It was closed.

I wanted to post about it with a picture of our fountain. 

At one point the entire lower part froze solid. It’s never…