The holidays are over and life is settling back into its normal everyday rhythm. I'm taking down the tree this weekend and organizing my holiday gear a little more effectively, a trend that I intend to carry over to the rest of the house. 2015 was another quiet year for this blog, mostly because I was busy, Gareth was busy, there wasn't much interesting going on in the kitchen - just good workaday meals that come together easy at the end of the day.
Read MoreOn Honoring Family Heritage
My great-great-grandmother on my mother's side was named Princess Teske. And she had a story to match the name. She was kicked out of her Amish community when she voluntarily left to marry a nice Catholic boy. It was her blood that sang in my veins the first time I drove through the mountains of Pennsylvania Dutch country on the early morning leg of a college road trip, the mist in the valleys below pink with the rising sun. It felt like home, and I knew I would return. A few years after that, I did move to nearby Maryland.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: Return of the Fruitcake
A few years back, I decided to learn how to make fruitcake. It is a holiday classic, and I strongly felt that it should be in my repertoire. I found a clever little recipe on Epicurious that called for only a couple of varieties of dried fruit, and I worked with it until i got it just right. At the request of my counterpart, I chose to give it a rest last year and pulled it from the cookie basket. And I heard about it. So, at the request of those regulars on the cookie lit, I brought it back this year.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: Butterscotch Brownies
The one no-fail, sure-fire, knock-it-out-of-the-ballpark cookie recipe I include in my cookie basket every year is my mother's butterscotch brownie recipe. I grew up eating these - not just during the holidays, but all year round. Friends, neighbors, and co-workers alike snarf these down with child-like abandon, and I know I would hear about it if I stopped including them.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: Spiced Apple Cookies
I like a little spice cookie and am always looking for new recipes to incorporate spice into my holiday cookie basket. I found this interesting recipe on Food52 from user Kelsey the Naptime Chef, who credits a neighbor for this recipe. It's a straight-forward recipe that results in a moist, cake-like cookie with a nice apple pie-like flavor as promised by the baker.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: Figgy Pudding Butter Cookies
Last year, I decided to try to incorporate fig into my holiday baking. It's one of those traditional holiday flavors, and many classic recipes can be found that feature dried fig. But, when it comes to incorporating figs into my annual holiday cookie basket, I've had little success. Last year I tried Anise Fig and Date pinwheels, a challenging recipe that I am not entirely sure ended up tasting the way it should. This year, I opted for what I hoped would result in a sweeter cookie with a more pronounced fig flavor - Figgy Pudding Butter Cookies from Food52.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: Old School Pumpkin Pie
I've never made a pumpkin pie. This is primarily because I've never had a pumpkin pie that I like as much as a good fruit pie. So, for the holidays, my counterpart gets what was traditional for my family growing up in close proximity to Wisconsin's cherry orchards - a nice tart cherry pie. Even on Thanksgiving.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: Mary Cherry Christmas Pie
When my counterpart and I started discussing Christmas dinner a few weeks back, I knew I wanted a cherry pie. I grew up in Northeast Wisconsin, and we spent our Christmases with my grandparents and cousins in Sturgeon Bay on the Door Peninsula, where orchards of tart cherries littered the landscape from Brussels bordering Kewaunee County in the south up to Gills Rock on the northern tip of the mainland where a ferry could take you to the islands on the very northern tip between Upper and Lower Michigan. Every Christmas, every holiday, ended with a tart cherry pie.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: Fig and Date Pinwheels
Last weekend's Holiday Baking Marathon resulted in some lovely cookie baskets, including a couple for the office. The baskets included my traditional shortbread and my mother's butterscotch brownies, plus cocoa chocolate chip, honey ginger, Chinese Five Spice, and my first attempt at pinwheel cookies - anise-scented fig and date swirls. It was this last variety that inspired a comment from a coworker that captures the spirit of holiday baking. He said that his grandmother had made those cookies, and he remembered eating them every Christmas when we was a kid. And that's really really the reason for the holiday baking season - to summon cherished childhood memories from years long gone and recapture a little of that magic.
Read MoreSurviving the Holiday Baking Marathon
Despite my optimism back in September and the very best of intentions, I did not start my holiday baking until about four days ago. This is late, even for me. I usually get going shortly after Thanksgiving. This gives me sufficient time to try out new recipes and to just start over if I need to. I manage to produce two successful varieties of cookies a weekend for about three weeks and end up with a nice variety of offerings that I package up and deliver to work and friends. This year, I had a bunch of new recipes and just a single weekend to make everything work out. This weekend, I executed my first Holiday Baking Marathon.
Read MoreIf the Stores are Already Planning for Christmas, Why Shouldn't I?
Last night was the first really cool night of the season. I slept with the windows open and awoke cocooned in the comforter, my counterpart similarly wrapped in a blanket he pulled off the bed in the guest bedroom. Despite the 90-degree weather we saw yesterday, it was a bracing 55 when I got up this morning.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: Triple Ginger Cookies
I'm an absolute sucker for those Holiday Cookie mini-magazines in the check out line at the grocery store. Even thought most of the recipes are absolute crap and always start with a box of cake mixed or a tube of pre-made cookie dough, I keep buying them because every one I have ever purchased has contained that single gem of a recipe that becomes a Yule favorite. Last year's Holiday Cookies mini-mag put out by PIL Cookbooks contained this recipe. It's all from scratch and is similar to the triple-ginger cookies at Trader Joe's. Except you make them in your own kitchen. Whenever you want.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: Blonde Fruitcake
There's one in every crowd - a holiday traditionalist who loves and looks forward to fruitcake. This has always mystified me as every fruitcake I have ever had has been heavy and chaotic and boozy and not very well thought out. I'm sure at one time someone came up with a very nice recipe that called for a rich cake full of fruit and nuts but over the years it has evolved into what can only be described as a culinary clusterfuck of the highest magnitude. It takes some genuine skill to pull off a confection of candied fruit and hard liquor and quite honestly for most of us at-home bakers it's pretty far out of reach, especially if you only bake in December.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: World's Best Sugar Cookies
This is another one of my mom's famous recipes from childhood and one she made often after school. She posted the recipe to kick off her blog back in 2008 and credits The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book by Fannie Merritt Farmer once again. And, as long as we are baking cookies, I'm going to delve into some Good Cookie Technique.
Read MoreHow to Recover from a Sugar Hangover
In my posting about how to host a cookie party , I neglected to mention that as the host, you'll probably be right there with the kids eating cookie dough, as well as icing, candy decorations and the cookies themselves. If we're being realistic, there's a high potential you'll eat more sugar than you have since childhood. Shortly after your guests leave (for me it was about 20 minutes), you'll probably crash, and crash hard. Even with a good meal beforehand (my counterpart provided ham and eggs). Your pancreas will just be overwhelmed, and you'll go down.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: How to Host a Cookie Party
A neighbor of mine used to host a cookie party for her friends and their children this time of year. Everyone would bring their favorite cookie recipe - pre-made - and we would cut, decorate and bake cookies all evening. I was lucky enough to be able to participate for several years running, and it was really a wonderful way to spend a cold December evening. With enough planning, it's not that difficult to pull off.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: Butterscotch Brownies
Holiday Baking: Lemon Tea Bread
So now that we are clear of Thanksgiving, I am full Holiday Baking mode. Every year I have a theme. One year it was Spice - gingerbread, cardamom cookies, etc, - another year it was color - lots of decorated cut cookies. When I asked my counter part about this year's theme, he recommended Blonde - light colored treats that would be visually appealing when packaged together. He also requested a lemon tea bread, sans poppy seeds.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: Lefse
Lefse is a Scandinavian flat bread made from potatoes and flour. Every holiday of my childhood included home made lefse and butter (and sometimes sugar, and the "sugar on lefse" debate is as foreign to non-Scandinavians as the dish itself). It's one of those traditional recipes that is learned by doing. I learned from my mother, who learned from her Norwegian mother-in-law. She learned how to make it on the cast iron top of the old farm cook stove on my father's farm. She taught me using a cast iron skillet in our old house on Quincy Street, the same skillet we now use to teach my nieces in her condo.
Read MoreHoliday Baking: Bread Pudding
My first holiday recipe is bread pudding. Thanksgiving is just a couple of weeks away, and this seems like an appropriate thing to serve the day after Thanksgiving. You can use any extra bread that didn't make it into the turkey dressing and any leftover dinner rolls from the dinner. Total prep time is about three hours, but it's a lot of waiting. You can make it the night before and reheat it after the Black Friday sales. Or if you're among The 99%, you can take some meaningful action against corporate greed, skip the mall altogether, and fix it up for brunch while all the family is still in town.
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