Easter Dinner Menu: Asparagus & Salmon

This Easter, impress friends and family with delicious recipes that allow you to entertain with ease so you can spend more time with guests and less time in the kitchen. I'm planning a delicious and healthy meal of Oven-roasted Asparagus and Wild Alaskan Sockeye Salmon. 

Salmon is filled with vitamins and essential oils that are so good for your body.  As an added bonus, it's very easy and quick to cook. Asparagus is a great seasonal side dish and when roasted in the oven it becomes slightly caramelized and crunchy.

You can find these recipe and more in my book, Coming Home. The Calypso serveware can be purchased on our web site.  

For dessert, I like to make Cindy's Bunny Cake. (Click here for this recipe.)  When we were little, every year around Easter, my mother would make the Bunny Cake to celebrate my sister, Cindy's April birthday, and the arrival of Spring.  It makes a great centerpiece! 

R O S A N N A I N C . C O M

Thoughts on Thanksgiving: Part 2

In response to the question

What do you think is the most important thing to put on a Thanksgiving table?  

I have two words: 

Fresh food.

At Thanksgiving especially, I strive to make sure everything on the table is homemade and make a point of using only natural ingredients. No margarine, no cranberry sauce in a can, and no instant gravy. This meal is as much about the time, effort, and love it takes to prepare as it is about the actual eating of it.

Growing up, I remember my grandmother made every single Thanksgiving dish from scratch. If you don’t know where to start with from-scratch cooking, you don’t have to look much farther than two generations back. Refer to old family recipes from your grandparents’ generation, before ready-made, instant food became widely available. During that era, there was nothing but homemade.

A Thanksgiving made with fresh ingredients from nature instead of from a can make for a meal that has something special. The extra effort and mindful attention to detail set this dinner apart from the everyday meals. The long hours in the kitchen are something to take pride in and to cherish. Cooking, after all, is one of the most basic and intuitive expressions of love.

This Thanksgiving, I encourage everyone to make their holidays as fresh as you can —

Not organic,

Not green,

Not eco-friendly,

just fresh.

www.rosannainc.com

You Are What You Eat

"Out Of The Kitchen, Onto The Couch," the feature story Michael Pollan wrote for The New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago got me thinking. The piece focuses on America’s increasing consumption of pre-made meals and a reliance on supermarket convenience food. The article emphasizes the fact that all over the country, American stoves are gathering dust and ovens are accumulating cobwebs.

On top of the most obvious disadvantages of consuming processed foods rife with preservatives, chemicals, and hormones, the decline of American cooking means something else. Because we are what we eat, in more ways than we know.

Think about what it takes to prepare a meal by hand: time, effort, patience, and care. All of these elements find their way into the food we make, especially if the meal is intended for people who mean something to us. It’s called cooking with love. Countless individuals have caught on to this phenomenon and transformed it into lovely works of art. I’m thinking of literature and films including Like Water for Chocolate, Ruth Reichl’s memoirs, Tender at the Bone and Comfort Me With Apples, the films  Babette’s Feast, Chocolat, and most recently, Julie and Julia. Even The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci includes a nod to food as love!

All of these pieces tell the same story. Food is an incredibly potent means to transmit beautiful sparks of humanity--passion, tenderness, care, pleasure, gratitude, and goodwill. It doesn’t get more direct than it does with food. You feel an emotion, infuse the food with that feeling, and then someone puts that food in their body! This knowledge alone is compelling enough to inspire me to close the computer, get off the couch, and start cooking. Right now.

www.rosannainc.com