It's tomato time again

I've been a bit late in getting my tomato plants into the ground this season, but this glorious Sunday morning spurred me to plant. This season, I'm raising a couple of varieties -- Red Beefsteak, Lemon Boy and Sweet 100s.

As I blogged last year, my garden produced like crazy thanks to the 100-plus temperatures in California's San Joaquin Valley. We have had much more moderate temperatures this year, but of course it is only spring. Those 100-degree days are coming, so get your gardens ready.

I've urged my dear readers to plant backyard tomatoes because there is so much you can do with them. I like to get very creative with tomatoes, whether it is using them in salads, on sandwiches or in salsa. I especially enjoy a Caprese salad, as well as making appetizing salads in hollowed out tomatoes. The previous links will take you to some of the tomato recipes that I've used.

Don't delay another day. Get your tomatoes planted now and you'll be harvesting them this summer.

There's great joy in cooking, entertaining and sharing

With this first posting, I'm going off on a new adventure and writing about my passion for cooking and entertaining. I want to share some of my recipe successes and even failures so that we can learn from kitchen disasters. I hope to make this a community conversation on this subject and hope you will join with me in offering your pearls of wisdom.

For me, cooking is fun, therapy and a creative outlet. I like to experience flavors, colors, textures in my cooking. It gives me joy to share all this with my friends, and I hope to make many new friends through this blog. I have many friends who are great cooks and I plan to share some of their experiences in this blog.

Feeding those we love is one of the basic things that women do. It's in our genes. That's why entertaining has to be part of the equation. We love to cook and we love to share that cooking with others. So we'll be talking a lot about how to entertain.

I love baking (probably because I like sugar so much), but I like all forms of cooking. So we'll discuss everything that relates to cooking and the cooking experience. I live in the San Joaquin Valley of California, which is the most productive farmland in the world. I expect that I will be talking often about using locally grown products in my cooking. I also have a vegetable garden and that will be part of our discussion.

This is going to be exciting. Join with me in this experiment. I think it is going to be a lot of fun.