My Pinterest Recipe Board #FoodieFriday

Two years ago I had to have surgery on my knee and since I had to stay home, my daughter and I decided to do a week of recipes from our Pinterest boards. The really funny thing was that both of us had pinned many of the same recipes we wanted to try. We had a fun week of cooking and recuperating!

Today, I’m sharing my board with you. Check it out for recipes to make over the weekend or when you have a free moment.
Follow Caridad’s board Recipes on Pinterest.

Spring & #Strawberry #Recipes

Even though it’s still in the twenties today, Spring is definitely here! This morning as I walked through Bryant Park, the ice skating pond was gone and the lawn was back in place. Lovely flowers were in bloom in various spots.

I love the Spring flowers and I also love one other thing about Spring: STRAWBERRIES!

They are so luscious and of course, healthy for you. They have a good deal of sugar, but have a low glycemic load which means they won’t make your blood sugars shoot up and then crash. A cup of strawberries has 150% of your daily requirement of Vitamin C. They also contain manganese and antioxidants.

So, today I’m going to take you to a list of 60 – SIXTY – fabulous strawberry recipes. Just click here to see them!

Also, don’t forget this is Day 2 of the Double Trouble Blog Tour! Come visit with me at the All the Fun Starts After Dark blog today and follow the rules for a chance to win some fun prizes!

Free Recipe Book – Special Thursday Treat

Last week I promised you a collection of recipes and here it is! There are recipes which are mentioned and/or connected to my various novels while there are others that are just family favorites.

I hope you will enjoy both making some of these recipes as well as eating them.

If you cannot see the screen below, you can click here to read it. Please note that there is also a download capability with this PDF version.

Recipes for the Romantic Soul

Fun Friday – Halloween Treats

Halloween is around the corner, so it’s time to start decorating and think of some neat treats to celebrate a paranormal writer’s favorite time of year (besides Christmas!)

Here are some interesting recipes to try this Halloween!

Courtesy of Pillsbury:

Thanks to Dangerous Reader Mimmi for sharing these treats with me and the other Dangerous Women.

Also check out these other fun treats from Kraft:

    Under-a-Spell Red Devil Cake
    Hot Spiced Witches’ Brew
    Spaghetti and Oozing Eyeballs

Hope these help you get into the Halloween spirit! Have a great weekend!

Thoughtful Thanksgivings!

ThanksgivingWe were having a wonderful discussion on the Dangerous Women Loop (you can click here to join!) about our Thanksgiving traditions and I thought I’d share mine with you and invite you to share yours.

Every Thanksgiving we go to my sister’s house for a wonderful gathering of friends and family. This photo is one I took a few years ago of the beautiful table my sister, Carmen, sets for Thanksgiving. We have a very traditional American meal of turkey with assorted stuffings and side dishes. Actually, two turkeys for this large crowd – one roasted and one fried.

Sis is an amazing cook and we spend the day chatting, sometimes playing board games, going for a walk after dinner if the weather permits and generally just enjoying being together and eating some amazing food. I usually prepare the breads, muffins and some side dishes. You can check the Cook’s Treat section for some of the recipes for that day. My sis’s favorites are the cranberry maple muffins and I always make a double-batch of those!

But Thanksgiving doesn’t end that day! The next day we visit my in-laws where we get to share good talk and good food with the Italian side of the family. My sister-in-law has taken over the reins of preparing the Black Friday meal and she always does a great job. We usually bring some pastries, wine or other goodies to add to the mix.

Through it all, we take the time to be thankful for those things we have in our lives. It’s important to remember that and appreciate how lucky we are to have homes, food, family and friends and the good health and Liberty to share all those things.

How about you? What are your traditions for Thanksgiving.

Website Design KISS

As you can see, we’ve got a whole new look to the site and a big thanks to the designer – MJ from Sizzle Designs. I absolutely love what she’s done and I hope you do as well. It’s clean, but its mood definitely reflects my romantic suspense and paranormals.

So there are a few little tweaks on things I didn’t think about immediately (sorry MJ!) and then there’s the reconstruction of the pages from the old website.

Why reconstruction? Well, I’ve learned a few things and also didn’t realize just how long it had been since I updated some of the pages. So little by little, I’ll be working on those, especially since I’ve got the second SINS book – STRONGER THAN SIN – due to be delivered later in the year.

Here’s what I’ve learned and will share with you in the hopes it will help you with your own website design.

  • Keep It Simple Stupid: Yep, I let my natural desire to bling just put way too much stuff on certain parts of the site. So to keep it looking clean and professional, I’m trying to unclutter.
  • Let the program do it for you: There’s a number of places where it would be way easier just to let programming bring in content. For example, on my Cook’s Treat page I’ve figured out how to feed in all the blog posts that had recipes. Much better than my remembering to code and add those blog posts every time. Now I’ve got to work on putting them in alphabetical order, but at least there’s no more recoding to do!
  • Forget about links to third party news articles: I’ve discovered that online newspapers, etc. don’t keep their articles up for long periods of time and the URLs no longer work. So, rather than having a lot of dead links (as I had on my Press Page), I’m going to just stick to mentioning the articles without a link. But if anyone knows of a good link checker, it would be greatly appreciated.
  • Don’t mention dates without a year!: I didn’t realize how many times I said, “this October” or similar and forgot to go back and update it later. So “this October” was actually like three Octobers ago! Be specific with dates or maybe better yet – if the date isn’t important, leave it out.
  • Using Categories Correctly: Remember that comment about letting the program do it. Well to do that you have to be consistent. WordPress and many other programs let you create “categories” for your links and blog posts. Be consistent when you use those so that you can pull up just the content you want rather than a mish-mosh of unrelated posts. Also, create categories that will actually assist you in gathering data for your website visitors.

Thanks for dropping by! I hope this Tuesday Tip was helpful!

Also, please be sure to drop by tomorrow to share some time with a wonderful friend and fellow author – Amanda McIntyre. Amanda will be sharing some of her recent exploits with us and anyone who leaves a comment on tomorrow’s blog by midnight EST will be eligible to win a SINS OF THE FLESH t-shirt!

Tortured by Amanda McIntyre