Me and the love of my life!
Hello! Thanks for stopping by! I’m Kelly, and originally from Champaign, Illinois and NW Indiana! My wonderful hubby Tom, our rescue kitty Snowshoe Siamese “Gilbert”, our outdoor kitty “Betsy” and I all live in a cottage right on a small lake in New Jersey. We bought our home 3 years ago and have been remodeling the kitchen first. Though the house needs a bit of work, it’s in good shape and the scenery and wildlife makes all the frustration more than worth it! I have several hobbies that I enjoy, but my passion will always be in the kitchen or out on the deck grilling, cooking and baking! I also enjoy photography and gardening and have been trying to grow as many vegetables and herbs as I can right out on the deck!
Though I’m a happy, stay-at-home wife now, I’ve been around restaurants most of my life! I had my own catering business for more than 20 years and even owned and operated my own restaurant for awhile many years ago! I’ve had no formal training or culinary degrees, just many years of hands-on experience and lots of hard work! I’ve also been published in Better Homes and Gardens magazine 6 times, as well as Taste of Home magazine, for which I’ve been a Field Editor since the mid ’90’s!
I’ve won many awards from both magazines as well as being a First Place winner quite a few times for local Chili Cook-Offs back in Indiana as well as New Jersey! SO much fun!!
Our pride and joy is our sweet fur baby (above), “Gilbert the Miracle Kitty”! We were so very lucky to have been able to adopt him! He was actually famous through tragedy when his life got a very rough start. He fell off of a 7-story balcony and had massive facial injuries, broken ribs and both of his front legs were broken. A good samaritan brought him to an animal hospital in New York, and when he was mostly healed, he went up for adoption. His story went nationwide, so there were hundreds of thousands of applicants. For whatever reason, they chose my husband and myself to keep him! One of the luckiest days of our lives! Our lives would definitely not be the same without him!
This is our happy place! Extremely calm day on the lake! I was lucky to take this photo when the water was as still as glass!
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Saturday, Dec 20, 2025 – UPDATE
Hello!
Wow! SO much has happened since I last updated my blog! This page, anyway! My hubby and I moved back to NW Indiana and lived there for 5 years. Our beloved “Gilbert” passed away and took a little piece of our hearts with him. He was like our child. Before moving, we gave “Betsy”, our outdoor semi-feral cat, to a sweet lady who brings feral cats inside. “Betsy” became the favorite, and is living her VERY best life now!
I had a lot of trouble the last 2 years that we lived in Indiana. I developed an horrific infection and had to have NINE surgeries back-to-back! I was in the hospital for 5 months, then other month of outpatient IV’s. Then about 9 months of recuperation and getting back to being myself. Before that, I had COVID. BAD. I knew I got it instantly, as it felt like I had been run over by a TRAIN within 30 minutes. My husband called our hospital, and they insisted that I didn’t have it because I hadn’t come in contact with anyone from Wuhan, China. *This was back in March of 2020 when it first was spreading across America and we didn’t even have a mask or stay-in order yet, let alone any vaccines. I was the second one to get it. My hubby got it first, but had a much milder case. Mine was BAD!! I was completely out of it for 2 days. I had made the decision to NOT go to the hospital because they told my hubby over the phone, that they weren’t even set up yet to receive Covid patients. If I had gone in, I could’ve killed everyone in that hospital and they all would’ve taken it home to their families. I would NOT be able to live with myself if I knew I had caused people to die. So, I made the scary decision to stay home. My hubby was afraid I was going to die. When I woke up, finally, I couldn’t MOVE. I just hung onto the side of the bed. I couldn’t call out for him or anything. It took a LONG time for me to be able to move around okay, and I definitely have “long-haul” Covid. I’m tired, get out of breath easily, and STILL have “brain fog” and “pauses” in my speech. It took a LONG time to speak in full sentences, because it was like MOST of my vocabulary had be ERASED. I couldn’t complete sentences because I couldn’t “find” the words. I slowly added words back into my “rolodex” memory, and a doing a LOT better. But I’ll NEVER be the same again. It’s been almost 6 years, so, I guess this is what I’m left with.
But for better news…
Over the five years in Indiana, we scrimped and saved and managed to buy our “forever home”! We moved down to a small town in southeast-central Illinois called, Paris, Illinois, just about an hour south of where I grew up! We finally have our DREAM home and will live out the rest of our lives right here! (NEVER moving again – – OMG – – getting too old for this!! HA!) I am still cooking, baking, grilling, and smoking, but have had a LOT of trouble finding my photos on my computer to do more posts!! They have changed EVERYTHING and have it designed to convenience mobile phone photo users so drastically that they have made it impossible for me to add and edit digital camera photos! We are working to get all of this straightened out so I can post again! I have so much I want to share with you! I hope to be adding new posts SOON!!
OMGosh! I almost forgot! (I feel so bad.) We have new cat now! We named her “Susie”! By FLUKE, she’s a Snowshoe Siamese, too! But much tinier than “Gilbert” and has the biggest eyes!! Just before moving back to Illinois from Indiana, I saw her photo added to the new kittens and cats listed to be adopted from our Animal Shelter. When I saw her photo, my heart BROKE for her! She was hiding in her litter pan in her cage and looked TERRIFIED! I showed her pic to my hubby and he agreed that we HAD to go get her. They told us she had been DUMPED in front of the building some time in the night in the FREEZING COLD in JANUARY. She was VERY skinny and had almost no hair. Her head was mostly bald. We knew from the way she acted that she had definitely been abused. She hid for almost a week, then one day, a little lightbulb clicked on and she practically RAN up to me, and climbed all over me purring!! I couldn’t believe it! She finally realized that we weren’t going to hurt her! She was safe with us! And she has been the SWEETEST, (and PRETTIEST!!), cat I’ve ever had!! She follows me everywhere and sleeps with me every night! I couldn’t be more thankful for her!!
So, that is how my life has been going, haha! Always a rollercoaster ride! But one thing is for sure that you can always count on. Life never stays the same. When you hit a low spot, HANG IN THERE! Because, believe me, things WILL change. Right around the corner something good is waiting.
Hope you all are doing well, and I hope to post some NEW recipes for you soon! My hubby and I will get this figured out. Talk to you all soon! In the meantime, I have almost 2k recipes on here for you to explore and try in your own kitchens for your own selves, families and friends. Everything from homemade salad dressings, to smoked ribs and briskets, desserts, cocktails, gourmet sandwiches, and even some retro recipes that I enjoyed when I was a kid. Take care all, and I’ll see you soon! Here’s to a new, and hopefully better, year! 2026 is right around the corner! XO!