Category: recipes
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Friendsgiving
What a great time when you’re a 20- or-30-something and you get together with work buddies or college buddies or any buddies for a Thanksgiving potluck. Chances are your people are from different places with different traditions and favorite recipes for stuffing, sides, or desserts. Everyone pitches in. Hats off…
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Pasta sauce
Hey, Dad really likes pasta with sauce…or without sauce, actually. I could eat it evey day probably. But then…you get it.
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Dad’s Ragu
Just about everyone (We have a notable exception in our family.) likes pasta sauce with meat and tomato. I love it. I’ve made it many times and tried various recipes, mostly called ragu or Bolognese. Ragu in Italian means tasty or savory, or it refers to the meaty, tomatoey, stewy…
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Dad’s Holiday Cranberry Relish
My first cook book was a classic, The New York Times Cook Book by Craig Claiborne (Harper & Row, 1961). My ancient, rusty paperclip bookmarks tell the story of why I have kept it all these years. I use the book only a couple of times a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas.…
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Yams Richard
New Orleans is one of our favorite places. On our first trip there, in 1977, we visited—through pure luck—two of its greatest restaurants: Antoine’s, where we had pompano en papillote (in a paper bag) and Brennan’s, for its famous breakfast. We took away two Hurricane glasses from Brennan’s, “>The New…
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Grandma’s turkey stuffing
Thanksgiving has always been my second favorite holiday because when I was a kid, our family Thanksgiving made me feel a happy-family-ness, warmth, and love that were beyond our Scots-Irish/Norwegian family most of the time. Everyone (I think) felt the culinary highlight was the Thanksgiving turkey stuffing (sometimes called dressing…
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Dad’s Keto Chili
One way to make a long-term Keto diet go down easier is to Keto-ize your old favorite recipes. I mean, duh, right? Now that we are Keto veterans, in-it-to-win-it for the third time (!), I’m more interested than ever in making sure my old favs can still be enjoyed without…
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Dad’s Anytime Creamy Pasta Sauce
Versatility is my middle name or something like that when it comes to cooking. Actually, I’m pretty lazy and always looking for ways to cook something that tastes great, is repeatable, but not boring. This has led me to develop some recipes that can easily be adapted to what you…
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Eat plants and prosper
It’s been a long, cold winter here in our town. Since the New Year, really, we just haven’t felt much like eating cold food. You know, like fresh fruits and vegetables. Weird thing. Comfort food has tasted that much more comfortable in this weather. But spring will come, eventually, and with…
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Whole lotta bakin’ goin’ on
If you’re doing more baking during our current stay-at-home time, I’m sure you’ve noticed you’re not alone—judging at least by the bare grocery store shelves where the flour ought to be. I’ve been doing a lot more baking than usual, which is to say more than hardly any baking at…
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Grandma’s stuffing
It’s what makes our Thanksgiving menu such a special, family-favorite menu. It is everyone’s favorite—back when I was a kid, when our kids were little, and now. It’s the #1 choice when we ask, “so, what should we have for Thanksgiving this year?” This post has been updated as of…
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Chaffles (aka Keto waffles)
Chaffles are double good. They’re a way for Keto dieters like me, who can’t get used to almond flour, to use it anyway. And, they let Ketoistas have something other than bacon and eggs for breakfast — Keto waffles no less. I think I’ve always preferred the crispy outside and…
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The versatile frittata
As you get the hang of home cooking, you get better, or not, at improvisation—making up new recipes or adapting old ones, to your current pantry or today’s whim. I suspect that my grandmother’s claims that she couldn’t pass along her greatest recipes was more about not remembering exactly how…
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Where do little shallots come from?
“Are those onions…or…shallots?” The 50-something grocery store clerk examined the small vegetable carefully. “Shallots,” I said. “Same family as onions, they say.” In fact, shallots are a type of onion, according to Wikipedia. This interchange in our local grocery made me think immediately of a story on NPR or the…
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Breakfast Casserole
I got really hooked on cooking when I realized that there are only a few basic recipes behind hundreds of dishes — more than enough to keep you and your family happy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for many years. It’s sort of like the three or four chords behinds…
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Crumbleburgers
Crumbleburgers In my suburban home-town, Cub Scout, and “church kid” years in the 1950s, we all loved it when the moms made “crumbleburgers,” my very favorite food for a summer picnic. I don’t know if crumbleburgers are exactly the same thing as “sloppy joes” or not. More important to me…
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Dad’s Beefy-Veggie Soup
I have never cared for vegetable soup or for brothy, beef soup. Until now.
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Travelin’ man
Source: Travelin’ Man About to become one of my favorite foodies, Michael Ruhlman has it all: perspective, perspicacity, and panache. Thanks to friend and foodie Adrian Vigliano for the referral. Enjoy.
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Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookie recipe
We’re serious about finding the best chocolate chip cookie recipe, so of course we had to do some basic research. Here’s a classic with a video to let you in on the key secrets of getting these favorites just right in YOUR kitchen. Thanks to POPSUGAR Food. Mrs. Fields Chocolate…
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The best homemade chocolate chip cookies
They say this is The Best Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies. (Offered by PBS.org) We’ll just have to see how they stack up and report back later! Dad
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Brussels sprouts are the new green beans
For holiday feasts, that is. I have nothing, exactly, against the standard green bean, mushroom soup, onion things casserole. But unless you make it from scratch, it just doesn’t compare, for flavor with this easy and candy-esque treatment for b’sprouts. One of the secrets, of course, is bacon. The other…
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Learn to make cake
My recent coffee crunch cake and chocolate cakes experiments, having turned out so well, makes me want to try more! But before I do, I’m thinking about enrolling in this cake-baking course from America’s Test Kitchen…one of Dad’s Helpers :). Here’s the infomercial….
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Dicing onions
So many recipes start with diced onions…chili, pasta sauces, casseroles, you name it. So, knowing the standard and very effective way to dice an onion will save you lots of time and possibly angst, as well as make you feel like you’re really getting better at the basic cooking tasks that…
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If all us fat people were lined up end-to-end…
I don’t usually shop at Wal-Mart on principle….As I was leaving, I thought, “All the food that it took to make all these people overweight would feed the people of Darfur for many years.”
Guy Cicero 