Thanksgiving

Pumpkin-Apple Streusel Cake — Two Ways

/ More Time at the Table / Leave a comment
A fast 9″x13″ cake for Halloween gatherings, holiday breakfasts, tailgates, or coffee any afternoon.

Jump to Recipe

How sweet it is to be home! I missed you!

Since I returned from a month-long trip last Sunday, I’d been thinking about a fall cake. Pumpkin or apple or maybe – probably – both. I wanted a chunky, dense sort of cake that a person could cut and grab a small (or large) hunk when sidling through the kitchen on the way to the mailbox. (I only had one bite!! Honest.) Something that, should we have need of it, would hold together in a lunch box or travel intact to a party without melting or crumbling or even shifting in the pan on the back seat. What about a goody to accompany a big cup of hot coffee out onto the deck some cool morning? Or one to sneak in bed with us sometime when that felt ok? (Are you a crumbs in the bed sort of person? While I’ll happily guzzle coffee in bed any day, I’m not a breakfast in bed woman, even when ill.) I had in mind what we currently call a snacking cake, which denotes an easy-to-make and easy to serve homey cake that’s for any time at all you need or want cake. Not an occasion dessert like birthday cake, wedding cake, or even an elegant dinner party cake but simply a hang around the kitchen, come as you are kinda cake. And while some snacking cakes boast a glaze, a frosting, or a fine dusting of powdered sugar, I was leaning, once again, toward a crowning cap of spicy streusel.

Continue reading →

Cranberry-White Chocolate Chip Scones

/ More Time at the Table / Leave a comment
Here’s what you’ll want with your coffee Christmas morning!

…dedicated to the memory of my friend, longtime neighbor, and excellent baker, Jan Keder (1930-2024)

Jump to Recipe

I got up one day last week to go to a class I attend weekly and thought, “I’ll just make some festive scones of some sort for our last December meeting.” What did I have? I had cranberries and white chocolate chips. So that’s what I made: Cranberry- White Chocolate Chip Scones. When I arrived at class and set them out, my classmate and good friend, Teresa Latimer, asked if these were from a King Arthur Scone mix. Ah, nope. Just straight out of my kitchen. I was, however, interested enough to later get on the computer and look at the mixes (turns out there are several good looking ones) — but there was only Cranberry-Orange from them so I’m good. Didn’t want to be copying KA or anything. I really admire them but…phew!

Continue reading →

Green Beans with Crookneck Squash and Caramelized Onions (Tired of Your Green Beans? Try Mine.)

/ More Time at the Table / Leave a comment

Jump to Recipe

When you have a generous friend who’s also a talented gardener, your life sometimes takes a sweet, interesting turn come summer. Regular readers might remember my good friend, Pam Lehmkuhl (whose kind husband also supplies me with gorgeous game and fish). Pam recently gifted me a mess of green, green beans and some oh-so-yellow baby crookneck squash. My go-to green bean “recipe” is to cook the beans nearly granny tender, drain, drizzle them with olive oil, and then sprinkle on salt, black pepper, crushed red pepper and really lots of lemon zest. (Great hot or cold.) I adore summer squash sliced and grilled for the most part. Thinking I’d do something different with both of them, I still searched my own blog first because… well, I could. An old Thanksgiving-style recipe popped up where I paired green beans with caramelized onions. I didn’t know how things would end, but I would at least begin by starting a pan of onions on the back burner. While I first considered dicing the squash up and cooking it with the beans for the last few minutes for simplicity’s sake, it sounded tastier to sauté those cheerful bits in a skillet. I’d then be able to add both the cooked onions and green beans to the squash and heat the whole shebang together right before serving. A glance at the garden had me running in with a handful of chives and chive flowers; they could go on top. Couldn’t they?

Continue reading →

Cranberry-Apple Whole Wheat Olive Oil Cake

/ More Time at the Table / Leave a comment

Jump to Recipe

Because this not too sweet cake is a tweak of a tweak that even I have made a few versions of…. I’m including the introduction to my blogpost for an all-apple cake from last spring to provide background…

I’ve been baking this friendly cake for a few months now in one variation or another. First, I was just fascinated by the ingredients in the original Almond Cake recipe, which belongs to Molly Wizenberg and was adapted by Mark Bittman and Sam Sifton…and later by me along with a few thousand of my closest friends. It starts with boiling an orange and a lemon together for a half hour, removing the seeds, and puréeing the now softened peels. Nothing I’d ever done in my not-so-extensive cake baking career; still, I was sold. There’s no butter but there’s plenty of olive oil, making it taste and feel seriously Mediterranean or just Spanish… and keeping it moist for a few days right on the old proverbial counter. That’s even in Colorado at altitude where bread becomes crouton material in 15 minutes flat. The original “Tarta de Santiago” or St. James Cake (very similar to the almond cake I kept making) is a middle ages and Camino de Santiago specialty still baked each July 25, for the feast of St. James. One couldn’t have asked for a better plain cake or maybe even one with more spiritual flavor. Think gently citrusy and uber nutty pound cake only lighter. My dad, who abhorred all things frosting, would have inhaled it. Only thing my cake needed was a little barely sweetened whipped cream or a few berries, as you see in my photo (below the recipe in this post). Or just a cup of coffee if you were my dad. Maybe a small Armagnac if you were me. A wee dram or a cuppa if you weren’t.

Continue reading →

KIDS BAKE THANKSGIVING: Ginger Cranberry-Blueberry Muffins

/ More Time at the Table / Leave a comment

Ginger and cranberry? You betcha!

Need other Thanksgiving dishes? Click on THANKSGIVING in the word cloud or click on/type into the search box individual words like TURKEY, BROCCOLI, PIE, SOUPS AND STEWS, PUMPKIN, etc.

Jump to Recipe

Thanksgiving breakfast gets short shrift in our world but it doesn’t mean it should. I mean, people are hungry on Thanksgiving morning, aren’t they? Or is it just a sad human bean thing to hold on for hours on holidays with nothing but coffee sloshing around in our tummies until mid-afternoon feasting? Surely we don’t need huge egg and cheese casseroles or piles of pumpkin pancakes with butter, syrup, and pork sausages (or maybe we do), but a small something like a perfectly perfecto muffin would, I think, go over a treat. Ginger Cranberry-Blueberry Muffins, based on my best blueberry muffin, can be prepped the night before by kids (or adults) — see below MUFFIN TIPS — and quickly baked long before it’s time to slide the pies, rolls, and your sweet turkey bird into the hot oven. If you’re the planning sort, they could be baked and frozen this weekend and taken out to thaw on the counter next to the big butter dish and a pile of cute napkins on Wednesday night. A little Greek yogurt with a honey drizzle would round out such a simple meal and, I think, keep you from dreaded coffee tummy. I mean, who wants that?

Just in case you want choices, I’ll include a few other muffins for you.

Continue reading →

Wild Goose Breast on Smashed Potatoes and Peas with Bacon and Mushroom Sauce (Icelandic Memories)

/ More Time at the Table / Leave a comment

Use this recipe for turkey, pork, chicken, or duck if wild goose breast isn’t in your freezer!
Jump to Recipe

When I told one of my besties, Sue Hall, about this recipe and sent her a first photo, she said, “And so where in the h-e-double hockey sticks are you getting wild goose?” I said, “I have someone shoot them for me.” “Of course you do,” said she.

Continue reading →

Double (GF) or Triple Chocolate Cheesecake

/ More Time at the Table / 1 Comment

…

Looking for Thanksgiving? Try my THANKSGIVING, AN INTIMATE VIEW (Redux) or click “Thanksgiving” in the subject cloud for more info than you really wanted.

Jump to Recipe

There really is a song, “If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake,” and somewhere in my stacks, I even have the music for it. This chocolate cheesecake, which can be made gluten-free (Double Chocolate with a nut crust) or not (Triple Chocolate with a chocolate wafer cookie crust), is without a doubt the cake you’d bake were someone ultra-special about to knock on your door. The wonderful original recipe by well-known baker and writer Abigail Johnson Dodge (author of the fun new book SHEET CAKE) is one I found in FINE COOKING magazine — or on its website–a number of years ago. (The famous site is no longer available, more’s the pity, though another site does have the recipe. See TIPS below.) I’d make it for one person’s birthday and someone else would say, “Can I have that cake for my birthday?!” Or I’d carry it to a dinner party only for the host to pull me to the side and whisper in my ear, “I’d really love that recipe!” It’s just that kind of cake. Everyone craves it, especially chocolate lovers. Even fine fruit folk (my apple and cherry pie people) have been known to ask for an extra slice to take home.

Continue reading →

Apple-Cheddar Corn Muffins

/ More Time at the Table / 1 Comment

Looking for a few bakers away from altitude (I’m at 6,800 ft.) to test drive this recipe and let me know how it did by commenting at the bottom of the post. Altitude bakers are welcome, too, of course–but I mostly need folks at sea level or not too far above. American east or west coasts, south, midwest –all fine. Countries abroad at sea level, you know who you are. Thanks!!

Jump to Recipe

My mom, born and raised near McComb, Mississippi, was the cornbread maker in our family. Black as coal on the outside and yellow like salty sunshine on the inside, her no-recipe cornbread — hot or cold — gave shape to our days. The cast iron pan graced the table at a tomatoes and green beans summer suppertime and then you could sneak into the kitchen of a morning and cut yourself a little piece for breakfast to keep from getting coffee tummy. If you were lucky, there might be an afternoon snack of cornbread topped with sour cream and honey. (And if there wasn’t cornbread, you’d do the same with biscuits.) In the evening, my dad would crumble a big slice into a glass and then fill the glass with buttermilk, eating the whole kit and caboodle with a big spoon.

Continue reading →

Pizza Egg Bake

/ More Time at the Table / 3 Comments

…

Jump to Recipe

No matter how old you are, you probably have a memory of eating pizza for breakfast. While I no longer indulge in such juvenile adventures, I remember them vividly. They began during college (little pizza in my childhood as my parents thought it was junk food) when waking too late to make it to dining hall breakfast, we’d grab now-stiff slices out of a cardboard box and shove them down our throats as we ran or biked to class with little hope of making it on time. (Was there alcohol involved? Well. We’re talking college.) Years later, I won’t say I never repeated the scenario after getting my own kids off to school and running for the car to get to my own teaching or library or church job. My kids would not have been happy at my snarfing down their favorite leftovers with little thought. Somehow I don’t remember it ever coming up, but I’ll bet it did.

Today’s recipe and post does away with the need for such disgusting (ok, fun) breakfasts because I’m here to sell you on my newest morning recipe deal. And cold it ain’t. Casserole, strata, egg bake, brunch dish, whatever you want to call it. You might be like me and have a favorite egg casserole you’ve been making for years and, if you do, good on you. Keep making it; everyone loves it. But just once, give this new very pizza-ish oh-so-crispy version a chance. I promise you’ll be glad you did. It is the stuff of many pleasurable brunches to come.

Continue reading →

Salmon Puttanesca

/ More Time at the Table / 2 Comments

Bright, briny, and brilliantly bolstered with happy heat, Pasta Puttanesca is a favorite amongst cooks short on time and big on hunger. Garlicky tomatoes, onions, salty anchovies, olives and capers, along with herbs and a little wine for good measure, all come together quickly in a hot pot and are typically ladled on top of a bowl of steaming pasta topped with grated cheese and fresh parsley or basil. If you’ve made the sauce and had a little leftover in the fridge, you know it’s also good next morning on grilled bread or scrambled eggs or even just cold in your spoon.

Continue reading →