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Slow and steady gets us through all these great food love links! Photo credit

Sharing the Link Love!

Another happy Friday folks! It has been a busy but very rewarding week getting back into the swing of school, but I was thrilled and proud and excited that my daughter just received word from Girl Scouts that she is a Gold Award recipient! This is similar in scope and stature to the Boy Scout Eagle Scout Award and I am extremely proud, as a mother and also as a leader of two troops to be able to say I am a Gold Award mom!

Enough gushing! Let’s get to the links!

Enter My Giveaway to Win a Free Divine Health Recipe E-book!

If you haven’t checked out my giveaway, please click on over and enter to win a divine recipe book from Lydia of Divine Health from the Inside out packed with tons of great real food and gluten free recipes! She really does a great job of mixing it up and providing you with inspiration and variation for weeks and weeks of meals! I thank her kindly for providing this great prize and I hope you check out her site to learn more.

New Blog Link ups for Foodie Lovers!

Angie of Cocina Diary shares delicious recipes and she has also created a lovely Sunday blog carnival called Sunday’s at One Food Club, so if you are putting together a leisurely Sunday dinner for your family, be sure to stop by her site and link up the recipes!

Tailgating party at seaside simplicity! Martha is a fun gal and I share a lot of her love of the simple life. She must be a lot of fun too because I adore tailgating and football and so does she! She is hosting a great Tailgating Sunday link up during football season, so if you have any great recipes you like to bring to pre-game festivities, drop by her lovely site and share!

If You Can’t Get People to Buy Your Product, Why Not Just Change the Name?

Tara Parker Hope of the New York Times shared the latest corn industry maneuver related to public perception of High fructose Corn syrup. Why not change the name? It’s an interesting read and another example of public perception is actually changing the food industry, or at least putting it on notice, just as the whole partially hydrogenated vegetable oil issue did. The public is pretty smart, if you allow them to be!

Food Foraging Goes from Survivalist Fringe to Culinary High Society

This one is for Butter of Hunger and Thirst of course, but also for Rebeckka of Cauldrons and Crockpots, both wonderful wild women who inspire me to look for food in the strangest of places! Seems master chefs are doing the same thing and including foraged food in their restaurant menus and others are offering them for sale in Food Boxes ala a CSA. This link came to me via The food news journal, and if you haven’t checked them out, and you are interested in food and cooking, you are a naughty naughty reader!

Great Guest Post by Alisa Fleming of One Frugal Foodie At Simply Sugar and Gluten Free!

Amy of Simply Sugar and Gluten Free shared a great guest post recipe for kobocha squash by Alisa Fleming of One Frugal Foodie. What I love about this recipe is the easy and unique way of preparing the squash! I love all winter squashes, but let’s face facts, most of us are limited by the fact that they have tough skins! Alisa shares a whole new world with the Kobocha! I also visited her website and was opened to a whole new world of healthy, budget friendly gourmet fare! Check her out!

Challenging Families to Learn about Hunger through The Hunger Challenge

Lana of Bibberche is an amazing writer and she loves to share stories of her childhood in Serbia, food and family memories. This month she is participating in a Hunger Challenge to demonstrate to herself and her family what it is like to subsist on the same amount of money that is given daily to families in the food stamp program. It is indeed something to think about as we all go about our lives and cook for our families, so I wanted to bring it to your attention so you could show her your support. Please visit her site to learn all about the challenge and how her family is faring.

From the Sunny Marigold Comes Culinary Delights at Girlichef

Heather has done it again, delighting and amazing me with her singular talents. This is a tremendously well written recipe article featuring marigolds as a unique but key ingredient in a recipe for corn pone and also a marigold infused honey. She also shares some history and facts about marigolds and kitchen magic which I found spell binding!

Hearth ‘n Soul Hop Recipe Highlights

Well, we finally said goodbye to the Two for Tuesday Recipe Blog Hop and unveiled the Hearth ‘n Soul Hop, which focuses on so many lovely aspects of food that if you haven’t read our mission statement, you should check it out. I want to thank everyone for their continued participation and for the wonderfully moving food memory posts folks submitted this week. There really are too many highlights to share, but I picked a few as most of these either made me cry or made me so hungry I couldn’t sit at the computer any longer and I had to go and cook.

Melynda of Mom’s Sunday Café posted one of the most moving personal tributes to food and her grandmother that I have ever read. I cried for like an hour after reading it, and then I had to go back to re read it, and then I had to check out the instructions on how to make her Granny’s pie, and then I had to copy it so I could make it for Thanksgiving. This article is THAT GOOD and it is EXACTLY what we mean by food from your hearth, that feeds your soul. YOU have to read this. Period. End of story!

Brenda and her Canadian Kitchen has another hit with two recipes for the price of one this week. Lovely pulled chicken that looks melt in your mouth good and soft sandwich rolls. Check out her food photographs too, they are drool worthy!

I am not a big fish person. I know mostly because my mother was allergic to shellfish, and my father was not partial to fried fish and that is the only way my mother knew how to cook fish, so everything I ever ate was in egg batter and bland. This recipe from the neato Treat and Trick website is for spicey and sweet fish, and it looked so inviting, that I am going to have to try it. That my friends is progress for me!

Lisa of Real Food Digest is a wonderful and knowledgeable foodie and her site is filled with great recipes and information. She put up a recipe to make Gravalax and I thought since it is such a speciality and so expensive, that people would like to know how to make this at home with great success. I also posted it because, while I am not a huge fish person, I am wanting to try this, so why not make it myself! Again with the fish girls! Are you trying to tell me some secret that I haven’t been privy to all these years? Do tell!

Reeni is certainly a spicey girl and her goal in blogging is to spice up your meal times. She does an admirable job and her food photography is terrific! She shares a lovely end of harvest pasta dish that combines some pretty original flavors with end of summer bounty.

photo by S. Kaiser

I Tried It!

This is a feature that will be as regular as I can make it. I want to try every single blog hop recipe, but I just don’t have the time. Some stuff stands out for me and when I try it, I will take a picture, share my thoughts and link back to the wonderful food blogger who shared it with me in the first place so you can go and grab it for yourselves!

Mrs. Happy Homemaker's Maw Maw's Baked Peaches

Another peach recipe? Yah! Sorry, I can’t help myself, I love em! Crystal is a recent addition to the hearth and soul hop, and her lovely Mrs. Happy Homemaker spot is filled with the love of family, animals and nature. She surely loves to cook and this recipe she shares for her MawMaw’s baked peaches is filled with that love! They were easy to make, smelled divine while cooking and since it was a raw cold day with huge storms coming through, it was perfect for sitting at the front window and watching the rain pour down. My oldest daughter devoured it with vanilla ice cream on top, and while I liked it with the ice cream, I simply adored it with a big dollop of plain greek yogurt. I think it would also be spectacular with sour cream or yogurt cheese. Crystal, your Maw Maw would be proud of you and me! Thanks for sharing her with us and the recipe too!

photo by Jeremy Noble

Rollin’ With My Bloggies

Join me while I snoop  around other Food Blogger’s BlogRolls to see who inspires them. The Two for Tuesday Recipe Blog Hop and now the Hearth ‘n Soul Hop have given me quite a lot of wonderful blogs to check out, and through their active BlogRolls, I have been able to expand my horizons in food and lifestyle even further. Each week, I will share some of my lovely finds with you, and also give a shout out to the blogger who’s BlogRoll they came from. Please check them out and tell them who sent you!

Using a BlogRoll is a wonderful way to show those you read that you care about what they are saying and wish to share the love. If anyone is interested in being on my BlogRoll, please leave me a comment and I will visit you and put you on the roll.

Stacia of the Domestic Engineer has a lovely blog that she started to document all her recipe explorations especially surrounding the peppers she was growing in her garden. I followed her blog roll to a wonderful spot called Mommy’s Kitchen where Tina, the Mommy in the kitchen weaves together recipes for family and memories. My kind of girl!

While I am not gluten intolerant, we try to reduce the amount of wheat and other gluten products in our diet. I am always so inspired by wonderful cooks who seem to rise to the challenge of a restriction and create amazing recipes. Cooking allergy free is just such a site and K does a lovely job with presenting current information and recipes. I followed her blog roll to another lovely gluten free site called Ginger Lemon Girl where Carrie whips up many interesting and inventive recipes with beautiful food photography!

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend filled with food, fun, family and most of all LOVE!

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