Sigh. I love this mustard so much. I bought a bunch of jars for Christmas and ended up only giving away three of them. I am hoarding mustard. I use this on meat, in dressings, sauces, on sandwiches, once on my oatmeal, on crackers, on cheese, thinned out and mixed with some cream over pasta, and on pretty much every thing I put in my mouth. Oh and it makes the best deviled eggs I have ever tasted. My first cookbook will be entirely made up of recipes that contain Harriett’s Hotpants.

It’s spicy, the kind of spicy where you try and see how much you can eat before your eyes water and your nose does that weird clenchy thing….but it is also sweet and tangy and thick and sighhhhh……

For a long time I have hid it in the back of the refrigerator, and only used it when no one else is around, because my friend only visits twice a year, and that jar had to last. Now that it is widely available I eat it like candy.

So go buy some mustard. It’s the best thing in the whole wide world.

Harriett’s on Etsy

Harriett’s Blogspot

Once you have the mustard you can use it in these recipes!

Pasties

Bacon, Gruyere & Ham Strata

Beef Volcanoes

Sloppy Joes

Lentil Salad

I want mustard now.

Technorati Tags: best mustard in the world, Harriett’s Hotpants Mustard, mustard recipes, home-made condiments

Neither my froofy college education, nor my time at the calculator, oven, or bar taught me how to make my stupid recipe blog look pretty.

So I am still working on these things, but I am at the stage where I think it is good enough for now, until I corral some unsuspecting webby type person into my house and feed them cake and whiskey and make them fix it.

So, back to the recipes tomorrow.

I have decided that 76 cookbooks is too much for one girl to own. So. I will be flipping through the many that I do not need and putting all the recipes that I want on here also. Because the THOUSANDS of recipes sitting on the floor in my office, the many many many recipe boxes AND all the yellowed newspaper clippings in battered folders are just not enough people.

I will also be working on getting the categories trimmed down and turned into tags, so maybe you could find a recipe on here somehow.

There is a spiffy little search box up there in the right hand corner that really works for once, AND someday there will be archives.

Someday. Don’t get your hopes up.

Tomorrow I will be baking a plain ole boring white cake with chocolate butter cream frosting, shaped like a guitar for a birthday party. Since I didn’t want to make a plain ole boring white cake with chocolate frosting, tomorrow I will share my favorite cake recipe with you, so I can pretend I am making that instead.

xoxo

So I messed everything up and will be fixing it over the next week, while also trying to add more recipes.

Go Me!

Macaroni Salad

•  1 pound macaroni
• 1/2 c. sweet pickles
• 1/2 cup onion, chopped
• 1/2 c. bell pepper, chopped
• 1 dozen boiled eggs, sliced
• 4 T. sugar
• 2 c. mayonaise
• 1/2 tsp paprika
• 1 tsp salt

Boil macaroni for about 15 minutes.  Mix all other ingredients together, pour over macaroni and mix well.

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This recipe came from one of those page a day calendars.   It is from the weekend of March 9/10 and apparently in the UK that is “Mothering Sunday”.  This is the macaroni salad that you would find at a family reunion, congealing on the table while everyone plays horseshoes and drinks Rainier.

Things are still a little messy around here, pardon the dust.

Feel free to sign the guestbook up there and let me know you were here!

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I took some time off adding recipes (yet again) and went through every single cooking magazine I have subscribed to in the past five years, ripping out recipes that I might want to make at some point.

The thought behind this was that I would get rid of all the bulky magazines and have room for the “cookbook library”.  That has grown quite a bit over the summer.

Now I have a kitchen table stacked with pages from Bon Appetit, Cooking Light, Saveur, Taste of Home, Gourmet, Food and Wine, Cooks Illustrated, Real Simple, Martha Stewart, and boy howdy could I go on.

My little tiny stack of recipe boxes seems to be less of a problem than they did when I started this thing.

I believe the purpose of this site if going to expand in the next day or so.

I want to make all of these recipes, and this is an excellent place to put them and categorize them by ingredient or purpose.  So, if you are one of the people that come here looking for long lost family recipes, and who really enjoy trying to figure out how the heck to make some of these completely non-finished recipes….I apologize.

For a while it is going to be magazine recipes that I have either made or want to make.  Edna will still be here when this is all over.  I promise.

But for a while it will be just like you had a subscription to all those magazines for a while!  And for once, there will be cooking temperatures and ingredients lists that make sense.

I have one week to do something with that pile, I have a meatloaf bake off here in seven days.  So expect a lot of posts.  Yay you!  Boo me.

It was summer in Maine and there were lobsters to eat, friends visiting, wedding cakes to make, lawn chairs to sit in and beautiful sunny days to enjoy.

Now fall is here and I just finished canning the last of the tomatoes and am back to trying to make more room in my kitchen. (Guess I should not have bought those seven cookbooks at the yard sale I went to today. oops.)

While that seems like a lot, I still have not even made a DENT in all these damn recipe boxes.

My husband laughs at me every night when I sit down on the couch with a pile of recipes and my laptop, but I am not giving up. I still plan on putting every single recipe I own on this site, because since I have started this, I have actually been cooking more, and I have been trying a lot of the recipes that I put on here.

Some favorites so far?

Viva La Chicken was a big hit at a birthday party I went to, but I would recommend using low sodium cream soups, as it is really salty.  I now understand why you need to let it sit for a day.  After a day the tortillas turn a completely different texture, and turn into an almost noodle.  Very interesting.

Wacky Cake has long been a family favorite, and I made it for my chocolate craving family the other night.  So easy, and a million times better than the five hour Martha Stewart production I made for a wedding this week.

I have Sourdough Starter in my fridge waiting to be made into bread, and last night for dinner we had Edna’s Baked Spagetti, without any cream of mushroom soup.  It was fabtabulous.

While I started this as a way to get rid of useless gross recipes, I am finding a lot of recipes that I actually enjoy.  At least now I know where to find them.

I hope some of you are finding recipes that you have been looking for.  No, a lot of these are not tested by me, and there aren’t any fancy pictures, but hopefully someone will get something out of this, I know I am!

If you do try one of the recipes here, please let me know if it turned out ok, or in the case of Curried Frankfurter Casserole, if it horrified people enough to send them running.

Thanks for reading!