Thee best marinara sauce!

I'm gonna go ahead and keep this one simple. This sauce is delicious. It's garlicky. You should make it. It's a teensy bit fussy, but not too bad. I learned the original recipe while I was briefly working as a kitchen assistant in a fancy, upscale kitchen gadget store, that held cooking classes.

This recipe is adaptable to whatever season you find yourself in. In summer, you can skip the canned, tetrapak, or glass packed* tomatoes all together and just use fresh Roma tomatoes. In winter, just go with canned, tetrapak, or glass packed*. I used a combination of both, because fresh tomatoes are, for some reason, still a little on the pricey side here. Once again, I didn't really measure, just wing it, you'll survive. I promise it will still taste good. :)

Furikake Soft Pretzels: East Meets West, Philly Meets Hawaii!

Soft Pretzels hold a near and dear place in my heart. I have many memories as a girl buying fresh baked soft pretzels in brown bags served out of a shopping cart on the streets of South Jersey and Philadelphia. This tradition in twisting dough, then baking it to chewy, salted perfection began in the area 150 years ago with the Pennsylvania Dutch in Amish Country. The classic soft pretzel is topped with coarse sea salt and yellow mustard. I decided to experiment with some Pacific influences, including a special Japanese rice seasoning ( furikake) topping. The following is a list of ingredients used to create the topping and mustard: