Posted in miscellaneous on Dec 31st, 2009
It’s always so hard to choose favorites. I feel bad for all the great stuff I left out. Then I second guess myself, then I tell myself to stick with my gut. In the end, just like last year, I settled on 9 favorites and 6 honorable mentions.
9 favorites:
Chopped salad – I [...]
Posted in chocolate, dessert, nuts, pie, tuesdays with dorie, winter/holidays on Dec 29th, 2009
Conversations from this Christmas:
Me: I was thinking we could all go to the botanical garden’s light show like we did a couple years ago.
My sister: Oh yeah, we did that last year too, so it’s a new tradition.
4-year old, after opening a present: A truck! Vroom vroom! Can I open another present now?
His [...]
Posted in cake, cheese, chocolate, dessert, tuesdays with dorie on Dec 22nd, 2009
Back when my brother was the family cheesecake-maker, we didn’t eat a lot of chocolate cheesecakes. He didn’t like them. I always thought, what is there not to like? It’s chocolate, and it’s cheesecake. Seems like a good match.
But now I see his point. I like both chocolate and cheesecake, [...]
Posted in dinner party, freezer friendly, gluten free, potatoes, side dish on Dec 20th, 2009
Trust me, you don’t need a recipe for twice-baked potatoes. You know what makes twice-baked potatoes so good? Fat. The more butter and sour cream you add, the better your potatoes will be. The less you add, the better you’ll feel about eating those potatoes.
Decide what your goals are – if [...]
Posted in dinner party, favorites, side dish, vegetables on Dec 18th, 2009
You know what I hate? Those “hide the vegetables in brownies” cookbooks. I admit that I don’t have kids, so maybe I just have no clue and that really is the only way to get them to eat something healthy. But, for now, my theory is that if you prepare vegetables well, [...]
Posted in beef, dinner party, favorites, french, gluten free on Dec 16th, 2009
The importance of the Go-To Thing was hammered into me recently. I was sitting at home doing basically nothing, unshowered and unchanged from my recent workout, when Dave called me from a bar half an hour away. “Everyone wants you to come hang out!” Uh…will they still want to hang out in an [...]
Posted in cookies, dessert, gluten free, healthy, nuts, tuesdays with dorie on Dec 15th, 2009
Hey, have you noticed that I haven’t whined about gaining weight in a while? It turns out that I figured out a system that actually works to avoid weight gain. You’ll never believe this, but it involves getting regular exercise and eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins. [...]
Posted in Bread Baker's Apprentice, bread, breakfast, yeast bread on Dec 12th, 2009
I always struggle with how to describe yeast bread dough precisely enough so that someone can reproduce the results I got. Almost every dough is elastic and smooth after kneading, so that doesn’t really help. Sticky and not-sticky are good, but each describes a wide spectrum.
My first inclination is to compare it to [...]
Posted in cake, dessert, favorites, recipe comparisons on Dec 9th, 2009
Sometimes it’s the recipes that seem the simplest that can give us the most trouble. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people lamenting about their chocolate chip cookies. We think that because the recipe is ubiquitous that we should all do it well, but truthfully, many cookies are finicky – [...]
Posted in cookies, dessert, freezer friendly, french, tuesdays with dorie on Dec 8th, 2009
I was all excited about these cookies after I mixed up the dough, which tasted amazing. I was looking forward to how pretty they’d look once they were baked, tall and flat with glittery sugar around their edges.
Then I saw that there was some flavor variations that I could have played with. Because what’s [...]
