I’ve been gone for a time, nearly a year.  Why?  I’ll explain that later.  Here I want to celebrate home cooking.  For the past week I have been engaged in a bit of a home cooking joyride!  It has been difficult for the past few months to do a great deal of home cooking, more of a burden than a joy, but this past week I did a good deal of meal prep with an eye toward simple pleasures.  Here we go!

Wednesday of last week I made breakfast brownies.  That’s not some special recipe that turns a frittata into a meal.  It’s just plain old brownies made in the morning and eaten as breakfast with a cup of coffee.  Here’s how it looked!

The next day our yard man Dale came over and gave mother a sack of sour pie cherries.  After making a trip to Ace Hardware, we were ready to do something special with our new handheld cherry pitter.  I went through various church cookbooks and came up with an easy cobbler recipe. I don’t understand why cobbler recipes have disappeared from the cooking landscape.  Here’s the incredibly easy, incredibly tasty cherry cobbler.

I decided I wanted to keep things cool in the house the next day, so I took some grilled chicken we had left from an earlier meal and made chicken salad sandwiches along with a nice mango salsa.  I have always loved sandwiches, and this one is made with sourdough bread and butter lettuce.

My final entry in this week’s cooking journey is Memorial Day Strawberry Waffles.  I like to make fruit into sauce, especially strawberries because they can turn really quickly.  I am also a fan of waffles because they feel dressy but are remarkably easy to make, from scratch.  They can also serve as a base for a later dessert.  As a matter of fact, brownies can do that as well.  Thoughts for the week to come.  I always serve bacon with waffles.  I always serve maple syrup as well, though I didn’t need it this morning.

When I finish cleaning today, I’ll be ready to finish editing a novel one of my favorite people has written.  I can’t say when I’ll blog again, but I’m certain I’ll be back in less than a year.