Potluck Favorite: A Colorful, No Mayonnaise Potato & Sweet Potato Salad It's premise is simple, half potatoes and half sweet potatoes plus plenty of other vegetables for good color and good crunch. The recipe is a crowd-pleaser taste-wise and looks-wise. ~ Skip Straight to the Recipe ~ Stories of (Knife) Snobbery A food snob is bad enough. But a knife snob? I've cooked with a knife snob and oh, friends, and it's not pretty. When one takes charge of your kitchen, look out. Inspection starts with a cursory look-see, disdain barely feigned at an all-too familiar brand and a stick tang versus, y’know, a full tang . Sigh. Then comes the test grip, checking heft and balance, followed by a telltale tilt to gauge the edge’s sharpness in the light, and finally the palm press, checking for, and finding, well, dullness. Big sigh. I shouldda brought my knives , you hear. Then, You gotta sharpener? Swoosh, swoosh, the blade scrapes against the sharpening steel, ...

Two strawberry salads, great ways to show off spring strawberries. The first strawberry salad is so special, it's worth saving for tender home-grown strawberries. But no worry, the second strawberry salad works beautifully with supermarket strawberries. Both use Candied Almonds, gorgeous orbs of nutty sweetness. ~ Skip Straight to the Recipes ~ ~ Strawberry Pepper Salad ~ ~ Strawberry Spinach Salad with Homemade Poppy Seed Dressing ~ ~ Candied Almonds ~ COMPLIMENTS! "Holy moly ... may be the world's best use of strawberries." ~ Jo Beth "Strawberries with almonds and parmesan and pepper.... mmm!" ~ Anonymous Waiting, Waiting, Waiting ... Each year, as the last days of May slip into the first hours of June, the local strawberries are fat and juicy and perfect. The season seems to last a whole ten seconds, a couple of weeks at most – but only in a good year, for reality depends on sun and rain and temperature, the unpredictabili...