Sharon, I just love pecans and am looking forward to trying your recipe. We have several native pecan trees on our property. Actually we have probably a couple dozen trees, but two are right by the house and easy to access...the one in the front yard drops pecans everywhere. The one on the edge of the woods drops them into tons of leaf litter and debris, so I have to search harder for those. Most of the other trees are way back in the woods and I usually leave their nuts for the wildlife. I grew up in a pecan-loving family. If the only thing I do is make batches of pecan pralines for family members for Christmas, they are just thrilled to death. They're even tickled pink if I just give them big zip-lock bags of pecans from our place. Our first year here there was a huge bumper crop of pecans in the front yard right at Thanksgiving. All my siblings, their spouses, my mom and dad, my nieces and nephews, my aunt, my cousin and her spouse and kids spent their Thanksgiving picking up Wal-Mart bags full of nuts. They even wanted to eat outside at the picnic table under the pecan tree. Apparently they allthought they were helping me out by picking up the pecans for me. When I told them to keep the pecans for themselves, LOL, they ran back outside and picked up more. I was rolling on the ground laughing at them! "Oh", they said delightedly, "You mean we can keep them? Let's go find more!" Clearly my family members know the value of a good sack of fresh pecans! I had the last laugh though. I was SO relieved thinking of them spending all THEIR time cracking and picking out the nutmeats, because I'd intended to do it myself and give the nuts to them for Christmas. Instead, they all got gifts from the store, and I didn't spend a month of evenings cracking pecans and picking out the nutmeats to give away. So, we all were happy! I still need to find and post my recipe for pecan cream pie like my aunts used to make. I haven't made one in ages and just thinking about it makes me want to make one right now. Dawn

Along with what colleenoz mentioned about the iron in your spinach and dressing it with vinegar/lemon juice, steam it or cook it quickly in the microwave - DON'T BOIL IT. After 10-minutes of boiling, 3/4 of its phytonutrient content will have leached into the cooking water. The greener the color of the cooking water, the more nutrients you have lost. You'd be better off drinking the water than eating the spinach. It's also been shown that we cannot absorb some of the most important nutrients in salad greens unless the dressing, or the meal it's eaten with, contains some type of fat. "Olive oil, according to a 2012 Purdue University study, does the best job of making those compounds more bioavailable. It takes almost seven times more soybean oil, by contrast, to get the same results. Soybean oil is the most common oil in commercial salad dressings." So make your own dressing with unfiltered extra virgin olive oil. "Clarifying extra virgin olive oil filters out half its bionutrients, including a beneficial compound squalene, which has been shown to help fight cancer and protect the skin from UV damage." The traditional Greek salad dressing: Drizzle your greens with extra virgin olive oil and finish with a few squirts of lemon juice and a grind or two of salt and pepper. I also like to substitute black pepper with nigella seeds (freshly ground) for a new and interesting flavor, and a new favorite - dried papaya seeds (freshly ground) which has a peppery flavor and lots of health benefits.

I searched for salmon and this popped up. Sounds good. We are cooking salmon Saturday for a crowd. It's not a whole salmon, but several packs of filets. I think this will work great!

Emily - thanks for letting me know where the recipe came from! I've added a note to my files - I like to give credit where credit is due, and I even did a quick search online before I posted it to see if I could figure out where it had come from. Woodie - truth to be told, I forgot to buy shallots when I went to the store, but it was a happy accident since I had some carmelized onions in the fridge anyway. I do think shallots have a kind of distinct flavor and would like to try it next time with them. With the onions I think maybe the sauce was a little sweeter than it would have been with the shallots.