With another week of Christmas and New Year gatherings still to enjoy, here is a handy, flexible recipe for an appetizer I collected from my friend Kathy Kerr who picked it up from her sister. Called cheese balls, they aren’t the spread-on-a-cracker kind, rather instead a pop-in-your-mouth sort. Here are all the ways this recipes […]
Mincemeat has been around for centuries, a way to preserve meat during butchering season, taking all the small tough bits, cooking them well, then chopping them finely and mixing them with apples, raisins, suet, cider or brandy, spices, sometimes candied fruit peels, and making a pie from the mixture which aged in crocks until use. […]
For years Fanny Farmer’s recipe for eggnog stood as the Christmas and New Year’s classic at my house, a wonderful recipe and very spirited. After a conversation with Sarah Walker Caron, my editor here at the BDN, who suggested I offer an eggnog recipe this month, I looked around to see what new wrinkles there […]
Joyce Cornwell in Lamoine set us off on an exploration for Pompadour Pudding, a custard topped with a chocolatey meringue that she made some recently because her husband enjoyed it as a kind of comfort food growing up. She wrote and asked, “Have you eaten this and/or made it? Do any of your food friends […]
When Carol Taylor in Frankfort asked us to find a recipe for apple pie cake, I never imagined that there could be so many varieties of it. Most of the time, this item appears to be a mash-up of pie, crisp, slump, and coffee cake. We see crumb lined pans with apple fillings and streusel […]
It is Wednesday and tomorrow is the big annual Thanksgiving Feast for which I expect many of you are too busy cooking to even read this column. So when your turkey is all carved up and there are only fragments of pie left, but you still have holiday guests poking around looking for a bit […]
For weeks now, I have noticed a tizzy developing in newspaper food sections, food sites on the web, and cooking shows about Thanksgiving which is–egad—next week, early this year. Many imply we are bundles of nervous anxiety about the big day. For sure, Thanksgiving is a food holiday, and that will inevitably involve cooking, and […]
Studded with cranberries and fragrant with orange rind and juice, this bread is an ideal accompaniment to holiday meals. It is not too early to accumulate a few recipes with the holidays in mind and Christine Hessert of Bangor who bakes breads for large family gatherings sent this recipe along. Remember Christine’s Chocolate Date Nut […]
Years and years ago, my friend Susie Hutchins in Worcester, Massachusetts, made green tomato pie which I recall enjoying very much. Susie’s gone now and though I think I got the recipe from her, alas, it is now amongst the missing. Just in the nick of green tomato time, however, along comes Fred Hartman in […]
What was I thinking when I planted so much rainbow chard? I love the brilliance of the yellow, red, pink, orange stems that sport deep green leaves. Such generous plants, gorgeous to look at and sometimes a little overwhelming in quantity. Goodness knows the leaves shrink down when you cook it, which the stalks do […]
