Discover the Secrets of Good health

Based on a tip in Alice Waters’ new cookbook, The Art of Simple Food, that fuyu persimmons make a good fruit salad, I begged some just picked fuyus from my neighbor and fellow blogger Andrea and set about to make this colorful harvest salad. Persimmons come in two main varieties - fuyu, which are [...]

From the my earliest memory, we have said grace at the table before our family dinners. It’s a simple blessing, our Catholic grace. I think growing up we kids didn’t think much about it, just that it was one of those things we had to do before we could eat. But ritual [...]

Most of the ice cream recipes we have on this site involve making a custard base. This approach results in a creamy and smooth homemade ice cream, but requires several extra steps and extra time. If you don’t use an egg custard base, your ice cream will not be nearly as rich, but [...]

“How many pies should we bake, dad? There are only 5 of us for dinner.”
“Two.”
“Two?”
“Two. Because there is nothing better on God’s green earth than apple pie for breakfast.”
“Ah yes, of course.”
We are making two apple pies for Thanksgiving this year, both with [...]

Updated. From the recipe archive.
This is my grandmother’s recipe, which my mother has been using to make our Thanksgiving turkey stuffing for more than 40 years. I’ve never tasted any turkey stuffing that has come close to as good as mom’s. Although years ago we used to stuff the bird, these days [...]

From the recipe archive.
We almost always have pur?ed sweet potatoes or garnet yams with our Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Usually we just bake them, scrape out the insides and mash them with a little butter and brown sugar. My father found a wonderful recipe in an old issue of Bon Appetit which includes [...]

There are two approaches to holiday cooking - fancy and complicated, and simple and easy. (Guess which camp we’re in?) Here is a colorful, simple harvest bake, with chopped butternut squash, tart apples, and cranberries. The hardest part is cutting up the butternut squash (it’s a workout). But then all you have [...]

Updated
My first encounter with Indian Pudding was over 20 years ago at Durgin Park, a landmark restaurant in Faneuil Hall, Boston, famous for its home-style Yankee cooking and, at the time, its cranky, octogenarian waitresses. Few desserts look so completely unappetizing yet taste so incredibly good. One bite of this lumpy, brown mush, [...]

Blustery days, fallen leaves, foggy mornings, chilly nights, where-did-our-daylight-go, clear skies, rainy skies, the first good rain since May, persimmons, pumpkins, pomegranates, pecans, walnuts, and those belles of the Thanksgiving ball, garnet red cranberries. Fall is indeed here.
My father loves cranberries. At the first sign of fresh cranberries appearing in the grocery stores [...]

Another delicious cookie by guest author Garrett McCord of Vanilla Garlic. ~Elise
This cookie has become a holiday tradition in my family and always makes an appearance during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Chunks of silky white chocolate help you ease in the holidays while warm and slightly spicy hints of brandy tickle your tongue. Plus [...]