I’m giving away a $25 Kroger Gift Card! – sign up to win by August 8. Click on the link for details.

Have you tried Breyer’s Smooth and Dreamy Ice Cream Bars and Sandwiches? It’s hard to believe they are lower in fat and calories than regular ice cream. Read what we thought about them and how they were devoured in no time.

And now that we’ve taken care of our body’s hunger, let’s take care of the mind. If you like poetry, you’ve probably already heard of Alexander Pushkin. I recently had a chance to review My Talisman: The Poetry and Life of Alexander Pushkin and found myself intrigued not only by the poems but also by the story of the poet himself.

It’s salad season! The days are longer, hotter and sunnier and I’m loving it! Several salad posts are in our kitchen and more in the line up. If you like the bitterness of greens, you may want to check out these two salads’ raw and cooked versions of Turnip Greens.

Filipinos have a penchant for creative nomenclature. That means we can get really creative when it comes to naming things. Just look at some of the names of small business signs anywhere in the Philippines and you’ll see what I mean. So it is only to be expected that this creative naming also extends to food.

Breakfast basics for most Filinos is fried rice (Sinangag) and eggs (Itlog). Most Filipinos would have rice and eggs for breakfast everyday with only the addition of a variaty of viand such as longanisa (Filipino sausage), tapa (marinated beef), tocino (marinated pork), daing (dried fish), tuyo (dried sardines), bangus (marinated milkfish), or pusit (dried squid). So when you’re in a restaurant ordering breakfast, you would combine the name of your viand with the name of the basics, sinangag (fried rice) and itlog (eggs). For instance, if you were to have the marinated pork, it would be ToSiLog – a combination of Tocino, Sinangag and itLog. You get the idea, right?

So far, I have made a couple of SiLog breakfasts in our kitchen. First, my husband’s favorite Filipino breakfast meat, Tocino which is pork marinated in soy, sugar, vinegar, salt and pepper.

The second SiLog dish I made is TapSiLog, short for Tapa, Sinangag and Itlog. Filipino tapa is beef marinated in lemon, soy and black pepper.

This is my husband’s close second favorite. But the best way he actually likes this is stirfried with onions and peppers ala bistek, for dinner.

A winter storm came through the Carolinas which started on Friday night. Snow fell through Saturday and now we are buried in snow! How exciting is that, eh? Well, when I say buried, take that with a lot of grains of salt especially if you live where snow is a regular occurrence. Don’t forget that we live in the South where any snow is a big event. So when we get almost a foot of snow, we consider that being ‘buried’.

We’ve been eagerly anticipating this snow since Wednesday when they started spraying the streets with the nasty anti-ice concoction. I was still at work around six o’clock on Friday evening when the snow started falling. When I saw the snow fall through my office window, you’d think a parade was going by! I was almost jumping up and down with glee and so was my office mate who eagerly came to the window with me. I hurriedly wrapped things up at work and headed home. As I was driving, the snow kept falling at a brisk pace. It was so pretty I had to take a video. I just love the look of snow coming at me and swirling around the car. It was beautiful! And I just found the coincidence so amusing that while I was enjoying the snow fall, the song ‘It never rains in California’ started playing on the radio! I just had to take a video. lol!
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