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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Cranberry Vanilla Coffee Cake

This delicious little cake from Gourmet, via Epicurious, has been all the rage on the food blogs lately, it seems. It sounded so good, and I thought it would be a wonderful Christmas morning breakfast. Unfortunately, as I discovered earlier this fall, cranberries are in short supply out on the west coast. After checking at [...]

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I embark on a labor of love

Good god. I had a holiday party to go to and wanted to make Christmas cookies for it. I was torn, however, between making really delicious cookies and making really beautiful cookies. Then, this piece about Zimtsterne, the German meringue-like Christmas cookie,popped up on my blog reader, prompted me to seek out a recipe, and [...]

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Since I probably won’t be doing much food photography while preparing Thanksgiving dinner, I thought I’d just share my menu. My husband and I are hosting a small Thanksgiving dinner – just his mom and a family friend. On the menu: Cheese, crackers, and sliced persimmon from our farm share Brined TurkeyA friend of ours [...]

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Cranberry Sorbet

This sorbet is wonderful, though it didn’t taste how I expected. The recipe on Epicurious said it was “Cranberry and Orange Thyme Sorbet.” You know how obsessed I am with putting herbs in my desserts, so I was really excited to try this. Unfortunately, it has no thyme flavor whatsoever. I used lemon thyme, which [...]

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Pomegranate Cranberry Sauce

The one produce item that seems in short supply here on the west coast is cranberries. Being a Massachusetts native, I love me some cranberry sauce, so this has been distressing. I’ve been searching for these things for a month now, since they are widely available on the east coast in late September. They finally [...]

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