Cottage Cheese Stuffed Avocado with Two Options

Perfect for eating on the deck with some pretty flowers nearby.

It's getting hot around here, and I don't mean in the good way.  I mean in the frizzy hair, damp underarms, I'm cranky and have lost my appetite kind of way.

Generally I don't eat a heavy lunch anyway because I get home from work late.  So I eat a light lunch around 1:30 and then eat supper around 5:30.  Most of my lunches are some form of leftover from the previous night.  However sometimes there aren't leftovers, or now that it's hot, I don't feel like messing with heating anything up.  On those days I make myself a salad, a pimento cheese sandwich, or my latest obsession - an avocado stuffed with cottage cheese.

Strawberry Balsamic Jam

My parents and a couple of their friends had a huge garden back when I was a kid.  They all canned, froze, or pickled what they could from the garden, and even though then I didn't enjoy some of my jobs related to preserving the food, I miss them now.

One thing my mother didn't make was jam or jelly, though.  She did try a small batch of grape jelly once.  It took her all day, and she was displeased with how it came out in the end.  I think the term "wallpaper paste" was used more than once.

No Bake Mini Key Lime Cheesecakes

We go through a lot of cream cheese in our house.  Seriously, a lot.  If I can't get the 9 year old to eat anything else, he will at least eat a whole wheat tortilla with cream cheese or refried beans on it.  Plus I also cook with cream cheese.  So every week I pick up a brick of it.  If cream cheese is on sale, I pick up two or three.

Gluten Free Butterscotch Scones

Another recipe I found on the Tea Time website in my search for gluten free scones was one for chive and goat cheese scones.  I made them with feta and ate the whole batch by myself in a week.  Oh my goodness, they were so good!  Feta is one of my favorite cheeses.  It added such a nice saltiness to the scone.  One night for supper we even had Nana's Sausage Gravy.  While the boys had their gravy over store bought biscuits, I poured my gravy over one of those scones.  Divine!

Roasted Root Vegetables with Brussels Sprouts

My husband declared in late October that he felt he needed to lose a little weight and try to eat healthier.  According to the USDA, he was, in fact considered obese.  And I have to say that in 6 months, he's lost 30 pounds just by changing his diet alone.

Baked Brown Rice

In addition to both me and the 9 year old ending up with 6 weeks of bronchitis the end of October through November, one of the reasons why I took a blogging break was because my husband decided he needed to lose some weight and eat healthier.  Even though I try to cook healthy for supper, and we don't eat that much by way of processed foods, he wasn't eating healthy through the day.

Easy Pizza Sauce

Before I went gluten free, we used to have homemade pizza a couple times a month.  To help us eat as healthy as we can and to save money, I decided I should start making my own pizza sauce.  After all, I'm making my own marinara, pizza sauce couldn't be difficult either.  And it isn't.

I found a good sauce we liked from Kitchen Treaty.  This recipe had everything we wanted in a pizza sauce.  Full of tomato flavor? Check. Just a hint of heat? Check.  Super simple? Check.  Easy to adapt? Check.  Freezes well? Check.  I adapted this sauce slightly to accommodate our tastes and my cooking style.