Those of you who follow me on Instagram and/or Facebook know that I just spent a week at Miraval, a Wellness Resort in the Sonora Desert outside Tucson. For those of you who don’t follow me, you should! Click Here for Instagram and Here for Facebook. (And for more on the Miraval experience, check my post under Adventures of an Asheville Cook) Anyway, it is a beautiful resort with food which manages to be mindful and delicious at the same time. They aren’t dictatorial about it. We weren’t prohibited from things we liked. You could get bacon and Diet Coke but the alternatives ...
Baking
January Reflections: Cereal Muffins
January. It's a hard-to-sell month. For most of us the weather sucks and we are cold and dreary and longing for hearty, stick-to-the-bone, comfort food just at the time we are trying to regain our balance after the excesses of December. Friends don't want to meet for a drink because it's "Dryanuary" and our cupboards are full of left over cookies and candy which we attempt to ignore (or failing that, eat them). But there is also a lot to be said for the first month of the year. With little else to do, I organize my shelves and try to make a little order out of the chaos. This year my ...
Holiday Cookies: Gingerbread Thumbprint Cookies with Eggnog Filling
This is not my original recipe. I found it online, or on Instagram, or somewhere (Two Cups Flour ) but the combination of eggnog and gingerbread spoke to me. Now that I have made it I can tell you that you aren't going to get a lot of eggnog flavor out of it but it's pretty good cookie anyway! And the best part is that you can make Gingerbread Thumbprint Cookies with Eggnog Filling or you can skip the eggnog and white chocolate altogether (but why would you?) and make straight-up gingerbread cookies. Now, since it is the holiday season and there are a million other things to do, let's ...
STARTING THE HOLIDAYS: FRUIT-NUT BARS
I hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving. Mine had just enough dysfunctional family dynamic to lend some poignancy but not enough to keep it from being warm, and wonderful and loving. And now it is on to the holidays and its paean to baked goods which fills the bakers among us with ambition and delight while those who don’t bake are happy and necessary accessories as eaters of our follies! In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I am counted among the bakers. From an early age I would flip avidly through magazines and newspapers dreaming and planning the cakes, cookies and desserts ...
ALL ABOUT PIE: RUM RAISIN PECAN PIE
Pe-can, Pe-cahn, Pe-kin, it doesn’t matter how you say it, to most of us it means deliciousness. In general, pecan pie consists of corn syrup, eggs, spices and pecans. But I was looking for something more than a sticky sweet pie with nuts (excellent though that may be). Like my not-pumpkin pie recipe , I wanted to mix things up a little. A reinvention of this popular pie, taking what we love about it and adding something more. First off, the crust. Guess what? You don’t need pastry for this pecan pie! I decided to go with a graham cracker crust. Graham crackers, with their honey ...
ALL ABOUT PIE: PUMPKIN PIE UPGRADE
For Thanksgiving this year you could: Buy a premade pie crust, open a can of pumpkin, open a can of evaporated milk, throw in some eggs and some spices and be happy. Make your own pie crust and proceed as above. Do something completely different and make a pumpkin pie but better! I am not a food snob. If you chose to go with option a, that’s fine with me. But I’m not a huge fan of pumpkin pie so every year I find myself searching for something that will make the pumpkin pie fans happy and that I will like too. This year I think I found it. The secret? It’s not ...
ALL ABOUT PIE: FRUIT PIES (APPLE AND PEAR)
Apple Pie My mother took the phrase “Mom and Apple Pie” to heart. I don’t know if it was because we lived near an apple orchard or if she had a genuine love for apple pie but we ate a lot of apple pie growing up. Fortunately she made a great apple pie. Her apple pie was filled with apples, not flat thin slices but big chunks of apple. Her pastry was a high dome of crust over cinnamon, sugar and apples and nothing else. To me this is how an apple pie should be. (And apparently to my children as well. Once my daughter was looking at table full of pies brought to a Thanksgiving ...
ALL ABOUT PIE: THE PASTRY
Welcome to part one of All About Pie! This is intended to be a fun way to get you to the Thanksgiving table with a lovely homemade pie. I promise I will always show you the finished cooked pie (because it always looks great before you put it in the oven) and I will share my mistakes and lessons learned as well as my successes. On to pie! Pies were an important part of my upbringing. My mother made wonderful pies for every occasion. My father loved her mince pie, a carry-over from the British traditions of her family. My oldest brother loved her lemon meringue pie with its tart lemon ...
CRANBERRY CHERRY BUTTERNUT SQUASH MUFFINS
Yesterday I decided it was time to inaugurate my new oven. Which of course meant that once I was ready to get baking I discovered I had to wash all the parts and run it for two hours at a high temperature to burn off the factory oils. But once that was done I was ready to go. It’s pumpkin season, have you noticed? Pumpkin pie, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin coffee, pumpkin candy, and more, fill the stores and shops and pages of magazines. But is it pumpkin flavor? No. It’s pumpkin spice. That’s because, to my mind, pumpkin doesn’t actually taste like much so we add lots of flavoring to ...
MURRAY COOKIES: THE EVOLUTION OF A RECIPE
I have been making these cookies for at least 50 years. Actually, I realized the other day that I don’t know when I first made them. When I was little my mother baked them for us. When I got older I made them with her. Somewhere along the way she stood back and I made them myself. These cookies however are not the same as my mother’s. Over time they have changed and been adapted until they became what they are today: a mixture of butterscotch and chocolate chips in a soft, sweet and salty oatmeal batter. This is my most requested recipe. And this is the story of how they became ...
