This past weekend, my husband and I had the pleasure of cooking dinner for some dear friends of ours.  As is my custom, I ended up buying far too much shellfish for the seafood pasta main dish.  Thankfully I was able to use the leftover seafood to make a delicious and easy Cioppino for Monday night’s dinner.  The seafood was originally cooked in white wine, tomatoes, garlic onion and a little lemon juice, so the flavors and the leftover broth easily blended into the soup. The ingredients were simple–a can of whole, peeled tomatoes, a bottle of clam juice, some leftover white wine from the weekend dinner, red pepper flake, onion, garlic, fennel bulb, thyme, oregano and of course, olive oil. First I sautéed minced garlic, chopped onion and finely chopped fennel bulb in the olive oil.  To that I added thyme leaves, chopped oregano and about a teaspoon of the red pepper flakes.  After the vegetables softened, I then added the tomatoes, which I had mashed by hand, the claim juice and the wine (about …

“Where does this highway go to?” Look at me, I’m blogging! It has taken me more time than I’d like to admit to write this first post.  When I was a kid, I used to get a stack of notebook paper, staple the pages together, and write a title on the first page.  Then I’d stare at my new “book” not knowing what I was going to say.  I knew that I had something to say, but for some reason, I was always too scared to write something in those pages and I’d end up putting the little book into a drawer until another inspiration or whim caused me to take it back out, tear off the first page and re-title it. “A Life You Make” is my modern version of that little stack of notebook paper, but hopefully, I won’t be too afraid to write something in it! I really want to use this as a way to both catalogue and share my recipes and learning experiences with my friends.  I didn’t go to culinary …