When Annie posted this recipe, I thought to myself, “What the heck? Annie suggests it. I’ll try it. But I don’t think I’ll like it!” Boy was I ever surprised! First of all, start to finish, this takes less than 20 minutes to make. If you burn the butter and the fire alarm goes off and you can’t figure out how to turn the fire alarm off and you have to stuff the alarm into the couch cushions to silence it, it may take 25 minutes. But if you don’t have fire alarm issues, I promise, it’s a super-fast meal. Weeknight dinner? I’d say so! And it’s healthy. And it’s delicious. It’s a new favorite in our house that I’ve served several times in the past few weeks! Try it with our summer tomatoes. You’re going to be delighted!

My apologies. I had NO IDEA that I had not posted this recipe yet. I’m so glad an observant reader brought this to my attention as I thought I had posted this recipe ages ago. While I love my yeasted waffles recipe for Saturday morning simplicity, I’m always so disappointed when they go limp minutes after taking them out of the waffle maker. Pam Anderson’s recipe for super crunchy waffles that stay crunchy for up to an hour after taking them out of the waffle maker is my new favorite. The secret is the corn starch and the 5 minutes in the oven. I absolutely adore these, topping mine with syrup, fresh berries, and whipped cream. Give them a shot and tell me if they don’t become your new favorite waffle recipe too!

Continue reading: super crunchy waffles that *stay* crunchy

I love my mom’s potato salad, but it takes several hours to make and sometimes I don’t have that much time (or energy! phew…. this pregnancy stuff is draining!). I came across this potato salad recipe eons ago on Brown Eyed Baker and its simplicity intrigued me. I have made it twice in three weeks, which is not something that I generally do. Because it is so easy to make, so tasty, and it goes well with so many main courses, this will be a mainstay in our house. Best part? No potato peeling required! Yahoo!

Continue reading: herbed vinaigrette potato salad

By writing this post, I am perfecting my procrastination skills. I am supposed to be cleaning house for our family Easter gathering tonight, but instead I’ve decided to finally share this recipe with you. In the grand scheme of things, what is more important: vacuumed floors or bacon? Right. Bacon.

This dish was a big winner in our house! Brant and I are both terrified of squash, but I thought that the pine nuts, crispy bacon and fried sage might be enough to win us over. I was right! This pasta dish is packed with flavor and we even liked the squash in it, which is a miracle.

Okay, I seriously need to go clean house now. In the mean time, thaw some bacon and peel some squash. You’ll want to eat this for dinner soon

Continue reading: roasted butternut squash and bacon pasta

Two weeks since my last post. It’s not for lack of trying new recipes. I have tried several, and all have been major flops. There were “store bought cookies” that tasted nothing like the classics we grew up with. There were stews and muffins and biscuits and… well, the list is long and the results were depressing. I finally decided to go with a recipe that could not possibly fail: coffee cake, and a William Sonoma recipe to boot. And now look at me! I know it may seem absurd, but it’s February and here I am pulling out pumpkin show stoppers.  I was so nauseous all of November that I missed my pumpkin fix. After 17 looooong weeks into being pregnant, I am finally getting my appetite back. And so it’s time to pull out some of those recipes that I would have made back in autumn if I had not been so sick.

Continue reading: pumpkin streusel coffee cake

The reason I have been delinquent in posting for the last 4 months is that I am 4 months pregnant! :) After two miscarriages last year, we are so thrilled to share this news. We cannot wait to meet our little guy (or girl!?!) and have our lives forever changed. In the meantime, all those pregnancy hormones have messed with my love for food. All I seem to eat these days is cereal. Life cereal. Raisin Bran. Cheerios. Frosted mini-wheats. I have a whole arsenal of cereals to eat because so far cereal has been the one thing guaranteed to taste good any time of day or night. Everything else has been hit or miss, and new recipes are *never* exciting these days. It’s challenging to blog about the new foods that I’m eating when those new foods are simply a new brand of cereal!

My appetite still isn’t what it was, but I did manage to eat some fish today, so that’s promising! While things are on the up-and-up, I’m back with a tweak on one of my favorite recipes: apple pie. I love making apple pie, but I love even more the idea of a personalized apple pie. Here I take my favorite apple pie recipe and cook it in small pots for individual servings. The best part? Layer the tops with cute cookie cutter shapes to match the seasons!

Are you a Thanksgiving Traditionalist or a Thanksgiving Adventurer? I’m somewhere in the middle. I love the traditional Thanksgiving spread with its turkey and cranberry sauce and yams and pumpkin pie. Then again, I also love to try new recipes and some foods are only served on Thanksgiving Day, so if I am going to try them, I have to be willing to take a few risks. Pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving is no big surprise, but the layer of cheesecake in the middle takes this from a traditional pie to a delicious adventure!

The best part of this pie is that you can make it the day before and chill it overnight. That means there is one less thing for you to think about on the Big Day! Hooray!

Continue reading: pumpkin cheesecake pie

My friend Bridget asked me if I would donate cookies to her school’s fundraising event. One of the challenges of being a food blogger is finding a home for all the desserts that I bake, so these kinds of opportunities are a great excuse to try a new recipe. Bridget specifically wanted me to donate a few already-baked cookies along with a couple of bags of frozen cookie dough so that the lucky winner would not have to eat 4 dozen cookies at once. I flipped through my must-make-cookies and came across this recipe that a friend had forwarded to me months ago.

After reading the directions, I realized that their assembly was way too complicated for me to ask someone else to prepare at home. It involved dividing dough balls into disks, mashing cream cheese between the disks and pinching the dough balls together while hoping that the cream cheese would not ooze out any cracks that formed. A tester batch was in order. I prepared one cookie as directed in the recipe and two cookies with a small amount of cream cheese pressed into the center of the baked cookie. A friend dropped by randomly and we taste tested the results. The cream-cheese topped cookies were a clear winner. My friend declared these cookies some of the best snicker doodles she has ever had. I’m not usually a snicker doodle fan, but I could see why she liked them so much. They are crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside, and the cream cheese topping is really something special.

As a general rule, my philosophy on dessert is, “If it doesn’t have chocolate, why bother?” These cookies break that rule. My mom makes pecan sandies every year for Christmas. They are lightly sweet, deeply buttery and over-the-top delicious. I am so glad that she shared the recipe with me so that I can share it with you. These are simple cookies to make and they are even easier to eat! They hold up well to give away as gifts. Don’t just bake them at Christmas either! They’re delicious all year long!

October slipped away so quickly that I completely forgot to share this pie with you! Oops! Here’s the Pie of the Month for November October!

I found this recipe in Nick Malgieri’s Modern Baker book but Nick got the recipe from Maida Heatter. You know recipes are great when they’ve come through TWO famous bakers before they get to your kitchen! My dad ate a slice two days after I baked it and declared the pie a masterpiece. I can’t imagine what he would have said if he had tasted it warm from the oven!

I only made a few modifications to this recipe. First, I added some cornstarch to the apple mixture because I like a thicker filling. I also reduced the sugar, and when making it again I’d reduce it even more. I really like the apple flavors to pop in my pies, and besides…. there’s plenty of sugar in the vanilla ice cream I load on top! I also like my apple pie to have crunchy apples, but I may stand alone in that camp, so while I’d cook the apples less in the future, I won’t include that change in this recipe because I’m sure some of you think I’m strange.

By the way, this pie does use 5 pounds of apples. Five pounds of apples takes a heck of a long time to peel unless you have a peeler and corer. If you do, then you’re in luck because you’ll save yourself an hour of peeling and slicing. Otherwise, get peeling! You’ve got a lot to do!

Also, note that this recipe calls for two kinds of apples. You want the Granny Smiths because they retain their shape and provide a bit of tartness. You want the Golden Delicious (or a similarly softer apple) because they will break down to form a thick, apply sauce. (Apply is a word by the way. I had no idea until I typed it and auto-correct didn’t yell at me to fix it. Who’da thought? Words with Friends, here I come!!!)

Enough chit chat. Let’s bake!