Many thanks!

I am so delighted and appreciative of the enthusiastic response to my new endeavor here.  Connecting with friends brings back so many memories and somehow the best memories include food!  As a young family starting out, we had friends in similar circumstances.  Little kids, new mortgages and not much expendable income.  Often on Friday evenings, we would get together over a pot of spaghetti and a homemade chocolate cake.  We drank cheap wine and the kids played together in another room.  They were the best times!  No fancy table settings needed, just good friends, good food and maybe a deck of cards.

These days I step it up a notch.  I love creating tablescapes, mixing and matching dishes, cloth napkins, unusual center pieces, casual and colorful. The menus may  have become more inspired, but the joy of friends and family sharing the meal remains the best part of it all.

To add a little history, my dining room table is the oval drop leaf table that was in my great grandmother's kitchen when I was born.  I have stained the top and repainted the legs through the years.  I learned to write at that table and so did my daughters.  It was the scene of many pancake breakfasts at the Jersey shore along with spilled milk, no tears shed!  It has held card games, jigsaw puzzles and lots of Play Doh.  The years of love surrounding that table flavors my dishes with something that can't be grown in a garden, only grown in a heart!

Peggy, a new friend, asked me to spend an afternoon soon making homemade rosemary jelly.  Like me, she has a rosemary growing outside her door.  I can't wait.  Rosemary jelly....I can smell a rack of  spring lamb roasting now...