Spring is here and Summer is just around the corner. With more produce available, salads are becoming the mode du menu – everyone loves a fresh salad at a picnic – be it potato, pasta or some other fresh creation. But why wait for a season or an event – you can make a fresh tasting meal anytime. Here are two salads I made today – the first I call Three Bean Fiesta Salad and this we ate at lunch. The other salad I made today is Broccoli salad, a fresh confection of broccoli with assorted fruit. It went into the fridge to chill over night for tomorrow. Both of these salads age amazingly well and taste great as soon as they are made and even better the next day!

Bon Appétit!

Rick and I cooked up a southern storm for dinner tonight – Rick is after all a Florida native! (I know! A real live, bonafide Floridian!) The menu? Fish and grits with fried green tomatoes.

As I recover my strength I am once again able to cook for my husband. A pleasure he is very happy to partake of once again. Over the last few years Rick has had to do, well, everything. But since we relocated to Panama City I have been making a serious come back! We are able to go walking now THREE times a week – I can do 1/4 mile each time. (We started with just two nights.) But as my body heals and I gain in strength, I find I can once again pursue the things I loved and could no longer do. Cooking is one of them. Tonight I made Eggplant Parmigiana and we photographed the progress from fresh to frozen!

RECIPE:

1 Cup Flour seasoned with Salt, Lemon Pepper & Mrs. Dash No Salt

3 Large Eggs whipped with 2 Teaspoons Half and Half

1 Cup Corn Meal seasoned with Salt, Lemon Pepper & Mrs. Dash No Salt

2 Large Eggplants, sliced

1 Medium Tomato, diced

1 Jar Classico Tomato & Basil Sauce

2 1/2 Cups Mozzarella Cheese

48 pieces of Turkey Pepperoni

1/4 Cup Parmesan Pecorino Cheese

1 Tablespoon of Dried Basil

Prepare a dredging station: one bowl of seasoned flour, one bowl of egg wash (egg w/ half & half), and one bowl with seasoned cornmeal. Dredge both sides of each slice in the flour and set it aside to rest. Once all the eggplant is coated in flour, dip each slice in the egg wash and then drop it into the cornmeal, scoop meal onto the top of the slice to cover the egg so you can flip it around to thoroughly coat it. It helps to use one hand for the egg bowl and the other hand for the cornmeal so there is no clumping on your hands. Allow the coated eggplant slices to rest a few minutes while you heat your oil. I coated an iron skillet with about an inch of vegetable oil. Heat the oil until it starts to ripple and gradually add in a few slices 4-6 at a time depending on the sizes. Allow them to cook 30 seconds on each side. Then remove them from the oil and lay them in your baking dish on a layer of paper towels to drain. Place another layer of towels in between layers of slices when you start a second layer.

Once all the eggplant is cooked, transfer the slices to a pizza pan and remove all the paper towels — there will be a light coating of oil on the bottom of your baking dish – so no need to grease the pan.

Begin by laying out a single layer of eggplant slices in your baking dish, sprinkle with diced tomatoes, spoon sauce onto each slice and spread it so it fills in the gaps too. Sprinkle a light layer of Mozzarella cheese and top with 24 Turkey pepperoni slices. Then repeat this process for the second layer. The third layer starts the same way with the final batch of eggplant slices, but then spoon on the remainder of your sauce and top with the rest of the Mozzarella and add the Parmesan Pecorino cheese to the top. Finish with a dusting of dried basil.

Bake for 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven. Place it on top of the stove and allow 10 minutes for it to set up before serving.

Makes 8 servings.

I have a new favorite take on an old favorite!  My grandma Roxie Mulinex taught me to LOVE tomato & butter sandwiches on white bread from early days and I passed this little gem onto my child.  But now I have determined that white bread is the devil (along with Walmart, Credit cards and a few other sundry things). So for lunch today, we had 3 thin slices of artisan pumpernickel toast glazed with garlic & herb mayo and a slice of farmer’s market fresh beef eater tomatoes sprinkled with a dash of lemon pepper. Yummy!

We buy our bread from the in-store bakery to avoid all the preservatives and HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP (which is ALSO the devil.) The folks behind the bakery counter are more than happy to slice it thin for us too – it is lovely.

Designed and made a prototype for a cuff bracelet I called Pink Splendor yesterday. It is a glowing combination of hot pink glass pearls interwoven with large (6/0) hot pink glass seed beads, and fitted with a silver filigree clasp. I really like the weight of it on my arm and the way it catches the light day or night — it is a diva must – which suits my nature!! I will be getting to work on more of these beauties to add to the jewelry page!!!

Added a pair of matching earrings a week or so later… I used 20 gauge silver wire as the frame supporting the 6/0 glass seed beads and hot pink glass pearls — I added silver bead caps for a little extra bling on the earrings.

People are busier now than ever before, which is part of the reason that people shop online in the first place. While it is a fact that starting your shopping at GreenBackStreet first is advantageous in that you will receive cash back on your purchase, it can, at times be a bit of pain if you are shopping for the best price overall, comparison shopping takes time. Just like a physical mall, where you have to go from store to store looking for just the right product, an online mall like GreenBackStreet can take time.

We we are trying to make your life easier, by adding what we are calling “Hot Products” to our stores section. This new category isn’t really a category per say, but rather a collection of popular products – that a lot of members are looking for. The best feature of this is that you can link directly to the product on the store that sells the product – Saving you a tone of time. We also provide you with a price, how much cash back you will receive and a net price – allowing you to do your comparison shopping that much easier.

With this initial release, we are publishing two popular categories of products, Gaming and Do-It-Yourself. More will be added in the coming weeks and these will be constantly updated as new products are launched and/or other items pick up some “heat.”

Follow GreenBackStreet on Twitter, @EarnieBucks, to keep up with latest releases. We’ll be updating our feed with new “Hot Product” releases as they happen!

For several months, GreenBackStreet has been offering a very convenient way for members to share the love of GreenBackStreet with friends and family. This simple method allows the member to enter their email address and their email password into a form on the GreenBackStreet Tell-a-friend page. The GreenBackStreet site would then, upon submittal, behind the scenes retrieve the contact list from the email account and send an invitation to all the people on the list. This has proven to be very popular and members appreciate the convenience.

Today, GreenBackStreet is changing this system. The service provider in use prior to the publish today, Octazen, was recently acquired by another company and their support for this service is ending. Since this feature has been incredibly popular, GreenBackStreet needed to find another way. Well thanks to the open source community, GreenBackStreet found one – OpenInviter. It took some effort to integrate the OpenInviter system with GreenBackStreet, but we believe that the members will appreciate the new system just as well. In fact, the support for it is tremendous and provides members the ability to pull contact lists from a wider array of email service providers than the previous system. The form is a little bit different than before, but there are even more integration features coming online all the time, thanks to the wonderful work of the open source community.

Today is the day. Today is the last day that twitter.com will support basic authentication. This means that the link you may have established between your GreenBackStreet account and your Twitter account will have to be recreated, using OAuth. The process is simple and it is still a one-time thing. Just sign in on GreenBackStreet and go to your Tell-a-friend page. Halfway down you will find the Twitter account link section. Then just click the “Link My Twitter Account” button. A new window will open for you to sign-in on Twitter. Then you click the “Allow” button. The window will close and your account will then be linked.

The great news for you is that GreenBackStreet no longer has to store your Twitter login. This allows you to change your login on Twitter anytime, and the linkage will remain in place. Plus there is more comfort in knowing that your Twitter password exists only on Twitter, where it should be. While the OAuth method is more intensive programmatically, it is truly better for everyone.

TheBetaSource.com is a project I just finished over the last few weekends. It is now live and I wanted to share it. The client is incredibly happy with the design and I think it is a very good, beautiful design. It is the second site I have ever built in WordPress and the first one for a client.

I used a few CSS3 properties and jQuery for the first time (I prefer mootools, but since jQuery was already added to the site by WordPress automatically I decided to stick with it for this one), so it looks best in Chrome or Firefox 3.6.

Also got to experiment with TypeKit on this project which was an absolute breeze.

Playing around with the GreenBackStreet logo. Got some new filters for Fireworks and was just testing them out – one is lightning and the other is fur. Both filters came from Eye Candy.

For those of you who do not already know, Rick has worked for basically the same company since 1994. It started as Success Through Knowledge, which then acquired Distributech Communications which then was all merged into Pinnacle Communications International, Inc. Pinnacle owns a number of companies, and operates the website, GreenBackStreet.com,  a free membership site that provides cash back shopping.