Week 3

I didn't cook from the Women of Great Taste this week. Instead I cooked my mother's goulash and ate it 3 days in a row. Perhaps it was a byproduct of meeting my sister, Judy in Kansas City last weekend. Kansas City is our home town and we enjoy going back to where it all started including driving by St. Luke's, the hospital where we were born. Mother claimed that she didn't know she was carrying twins and they didn't do ultrasounds 58 years ago. We stayed at my sister Jane's condo just off The Plaza, my parents favorite area for eating and shopping.


The closest Judy and I came to cooking over the weekend was heating up a really nice jar of artichoke and spinach dip from World Market. We enjoyed pizza at Minsky,s and then went back to Eggcetra's (adjacent to Minsky's and I believed owned by the same person) for breakfast the next morning. Both eateries are places were my daughter, Rachel, worked at when she lived in K.C. and both are excellent.


But the highlight of the trip was our drive down highway 71 to find pecans. We had to go half way to Arkansas but finally found the road side store in Rich Hill. When you buy fresh pecans you can either buy them cracked or shelled. The cracked pecans have been put though some sort of machine that basically cracks and mostly shells the pecans but you have to separate the shells from the nuts. Not a difficult job and a much cheaper way to buy a large quality of pecans. The down side to buying pecans only days off the tree is that the ones you buy in the grocery stores always taste dry and stale after that.


I brought my several pound bag of nuts home and started looking at ways to use them before they went bad or I would have to put them in the freezer. So far I have used them in pumpkin pancakes that were delicious and chocolate chunk oatmeal cookies that were heavenly if I do say so myself. I've been looking at a recipe for honey pecan squares that may be perfect. And there are many recipes I could use from Women of Great Taste.

So hopefully next week I will have another recipe for my friends to try and me to report on.