Dark Days Challenge: Last of the Thanksgiving leftovers

I decided to participate in the 3rd Annual Dark Days of Winter Eat Local Challenge organized by (not so) Urban Hennery.  The challenge is to cook one meal each week focused on SOLE (sustainable, organic, local, ethical) ingredients and blog about it.  I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle a few months ago and have been [...]

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Pumpkin Pie with Gingersnap Crust and Candied Pepitas

As I’ve said before, I could take or leave chocolate.  What I really like in dessert is ginger.  I keep bags of candied ginger on my desk at work, and I eat Trader Joe’s Ginger Cashew Almond granola every single morning for breakfast.  So, if there’s a way to get more ginger into a dish, I [...]

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Try to find this in a can

I adore cranberry sauce.  It is so simple to make that I don’t understand why people eat that weird stuff in a can.  1 bag of cranberries, 1 cup of water, 1 cup of sugar, boil, and done.  You can add spices and fruit to that, substitute juice or wine for the water, and reduce [...]

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Persimmon bread, with apologies to Mr. Beard

If kindergarten teachers watched me in the kitchen, they’d probably give me a lecture about following directions.  I’m not very good at it.  To me, recipes are usually just suggestions or loose guidelines. So, when I found this James Beard recipe for persimmon bread, the fact that he is practically the godfather of modern American cooking [...]

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Cranberry Thing

I wanted to make a cranberry dessert for a Thanksgiving potluck.  Martha Stewart had this recipe for a New England Cranberry Duff. I am from New England and have never heard of a duff before.  After playing around with The Google and learning way more about this dude than I have ever cared to know, I learned that it’s usually made with [...]

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Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Apple Cider Sauce

I really like gnocchi.  I usually cheat when I eat it, and use a package from Trader Joe’s.  I made ricotta gnocchi once, and while it was good, it was too rich for me to want to eat regularly. This gnocchi recipe, however, is awesome.  I want to make it all the time.    It’s labor intensive, but totally worth [...]

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My new favorite side dish

I’ve been on a major polenta kick recently.  I had never really made it until I made the braised pork with balsamic and grapes, and now I’m hooked.  It’s cheap, and while it’s a minor pain in the neck to make since it requires that you stir pretty much non stop for 10-15 minutes, it [...]

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The Perfect Meal

Every now and then, I see a recipe and it looks so perfect that I must make it immediately.   October’s Martha Stewart contained one of those.   The recipe takes a bit of time, but it’s completely worth it.  It’s delicious, it’s cheap, it uses a lot of ingredients that I keep in the pantry, it’s [...]

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Easy Stuff

I occassionally take on some pretty nutty baking projects that leave me exhausted, so I think that my idea of what is considered “easy” might give some people a coronary.  I insisted to a friend that these scones were easy, and I think she was cursing me while trying to figure out how to disperse the [...]

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