My favorite way to order a grilled cheese is with added onions. Sometimes it's a few slices of raw red onion, sometimes it's onions cooked on a flat top griddle before they're added to my sandwich. If it's on the menu, caramelized onions are a definite. Sweet, buttery, almost like an onion jam, they just melt into the cheese. Yum!

Oh my darling clementine! One of the things I love about the holidays are the clementines. I buy them by the crate and they become part of breakfast, an afternoon snack, and even dessert. Like little orange globes of sunshine, clementines brighten up the dreary winter evenings.

A few years ago my parents decided to start raising backyard chickens. Not ones to do anything halfway, my parents started out with 25 egg-laying chickens and 25 meat chickens. If you're going to raise chickens, you might as well make it worth while! Now more than two years into their chicken venture, they've found a nice pace; a freezer full of naturally raised and vegetarian fed broiler chickens, and a backyard of inquisitive and always hilarious egg-layers. Seriously just watching the chaos that is the life of a chicken is pretty amusing. I have to think life as a chicken is a world of two extremes; fear and single-focused interest in the moment at hand. It's wildly amusing to see their reaction to a cabbage or corn cob tossed into their enclosure, first fear then absolute delight at this new food treat.