Thanksgiving

Cranberry-Spice 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.

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!!

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 / 2 Comments

…

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 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 →

Pumpkin-Pepita Muffins

/ More Time at the Table / 2 Comments

Before moving to Colorado, I don’t remember eating pepitas, but I certainly got to them as fast as I could upon arrival. The tiny, full of health “pumpkin seeds” we eat for snacks, add to salads, tacos, omelets, or granola, and what I put on my muffins (above), aren’t like the pumpkin seeds you remove with all of the gloppy mess inside the typical Halloween jack-o-lantern. I mean, you could open up those big fat seeds (which have their own happy uses–see below at MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO READ) and try to get at the little inner seed, but that’s not where pepitas come from. Read on:

Continue reading →

Pumpkin-Ginger Crunch Cheesecake

/ More Time at the Table / 3 Comments

I can’t remember exactly when the pumpkin spice thing took hold. Or how it came to be. You can google all that and get your own ideas. One thing comes to mind and it’s coffee:

By the early 2000s, some evil genius figured out that it sold well as a latte with plenty of cream and sugar. An early reference in a newspaper is “Springs coffee shops offer something to fit almost everyone’s taste” in the Colorado Springs Gazette in January 11, 2002, which describes Purple Mountain Coffee in Colorado serving up a “pumpkin pie latte.”

Melissa Mcewan: Chicagoist/October 31, 2014
Continue reading →