Amy Currioman

My aunt is allergic to olives and olive oil. Sounds crazy, but it is true. So she finds it very difficult to go out to eat at restaurants, since so many chefs have been using olive oil to prepare their dishes. They claim that it is healthy for you and it is hard to get away from. She was telling me about a time when her brother-in-law, knowing full well that she was allergic to olives, gave her a gift card to The Olive Garden for a Christmas gift! Can you SAY passive aggressive?

I cannot even imagine how difficult it must be for someone to have food allergies and have to check the labels of every thing that they buy at the grocery store, or ask the wait staff at a restaurant to find out what is used to prepare the meals. That must be a major pain in the neck! I’m really glad that so far I have not found any food that makes me ill, other than an occasional heart burn.

One of the things that I really enjoy reading through in cook books. I’ve heard that cook books are the biggest money maker in the retail book business. I guess that makes sense; most of the other books that one would want to read could easily be borrowed from a library, but when you find a cook book that you really like, you would want to keep it.

I love to look at the pictures of the recipes and imagine how great they would taste. I wish that I had time to fix most of them; but reality is that I’ll probably never have the time or energy to even prepare one tenth of one percent of them. I probably really should stop buying them. But it is so hard to resist!

Many years ago I used to go to a frozen yogurt store that sold a frozen yogurt that they called “Raspberry White Chocolate Cheesecake.” That flavor was a specialty flavor that they only had once in a while, and it was my favorite flavor. And by my favorite flavor, I mean that I LOVED that flavor. I CRAVED that flavor. If it is possible to be addicted to a frozen yogurt flavor, then I would have been a hard core addict of that frozen yogurt flavor.

When that little store closed up shop, it nearly broke my heart. Where was I ever going to experience such a divine taste again? Lo and behold – I found the Cheesecake.com website and they have a recipe for white chocolate cheesecake that sounds like it is something I could actually make from scratch myself. Drizzle a little bit of raspberry sauce over the top – well, okay, a LOT of raspberry sauce over the top, and I’ll bet that I’ll be able to recreate that flavor that I have been missing these many years. Maybe I’ll actually drag out that springform pan that I bought twenty years ago and never used and finally put it to use!

One of my all-time favorite ice cream flavors is the Caramel Praline Crunch made by Breyers. Whenever I go to the grocery store, I look for it. More often than not the store does not have any. Not that they are out of stock, there usually isn’t even a space on the shelf in the ice cream freezer. Months go by and no Caramel Praline Crunch in sight. So tonight, when I had to swing by the Food Lion on my way home to pick up milk, when I saw that the store had it in stock AND it was buy one get one free, well I just HAD to buy two of them. Never mind that there is no room in my freezer for it – I will MAKE room!

With my prize tucked safely in the car, getting ready to head home, I called Chad and told him that I was on my way home with the Caramel Praline Crunch ice cream that we love so much, and he cheered “awesome!” I asked him to please be ready to help me bring groceries in the house in twenty minutes (I ended up buying some porterhouse steaks on sale and some hamburger and some pork tenderloin too.) He was ready and waiting to hustle the food into the house and dish us out some of the coveted ice cream. Tonight, life was good.

My sister and I went ahead and experimented with the candy melts last night. We poured an entire bag into one of the large glass measuring cups and put it in the microwave oven. My microwave oven has a soften/melt button so I used that button and just watched the little buttons melt down. I took the cup out of the microwave oven and stirred it, put it back in and let it melt some more, stirred it again, and then I decided to go ahead and just pour the melted candy into the candy mold.

The cup was a two cup measure, and I felt that it was a little bit cumbersome to pour just a little bit out at a time so I decided to use a plastic tablespoon measuring spoon and dip that into the cup and then pour the candy into the mold using the spoon. Each little mold took about one and a half tablespoonfuls to fill up.

I was worried about whether I should have sprayed the molds with cooking oil, but decided to try it without the oil, since the instructions that came with the candy melts did not indicate anything about greasing. We stayed up until 2am working on those candies!