I have always loved gingerbread cookies and over the past twenty years have tried several different recipes for my Christmas cookie bags. This is a lovingly adapted recipe from the now defunct Gourmet Magazine. It is the best that I have stumbled upon in terms of the balance of the spices and the degree of fluffiness. It is also a very forgiving dough…so you can mess up and re-roll it several times which is great for toddlers.
On our honeymoon in Eleuthra, we ate at a restaurant owned by Italians where I was scolded for asking for cheese with my shrimp and squid. I was internally hand gesturing to them through my eyes – but I’m Sicilian – we love to combine cheese with seafood. Arguably, anytime you add a pesto to seafood you are marrying cheese and seafood with a delicious result. So why all the snobbery with combining seafood with cheese? I hope that this version of shrimp pasta helps you reconsider the antiquated rule of not topping seafood with cheese.
My absolute favorite part of eating chili (aside from all of the spices) is the smorgasbord of toppings. Serve the chili directly from the pot and set up a series of bowls containing the toppings. If you have picky eaters, it allows everyone to customize their chili to their liking. For my husband, that usually means adding more spice and for me it usually means adding more cheese.
Chicken and dumplings are a southern staple. I have heard fairy tales of my grandmother’s famed chicken and dumplings that were as light as air since I was a child. Of course, no one ever wrote the recipe down or taught the next generation to make the angelic dumplings. So, here I am almost seventy years later trying to recreate the flavors of my mother’s childhood.
I love a good blueberry muffin. The kind of mythical blueberry muffin that has the perfect balance of blueberries to fluffy moist muffin dough that you discover at a breakfast cafe in a small town. The kind of magical blueberry muffin that is so delicious that you buy extra to take home for the next morning. The kind of muffin that I could NEVER find a recipe for in a cookbook. Year after year, I baked blueberry muffins that were, to say the least, underwhelming. Until I stumbled upon brown butter blueberry muffins.
Buy fresh turkey from grocery store (with three children in tow). Buy fresh chestnuts. Roast fresh chestnuts. Peel fresh chestnuts (with three children running around the kitchen with assorted rackets and balls). Make chestnut stuffing (while hoping children have found cartoons on TV to watch). Make cranberry dressing. Clean house for guests. Set table with china. Serve Thanksgiving lunch. Put up all food and clean all china (hoping everyone is in a tryptophan induced nap instead of having a shaving cream war in the bathroom). I really don’t know how my mom managed to host Thanksgiving…but she did for years without much complaint.
Over the years, I’ve made several versions of potato salad…warm, cold, and with different flavored mayonnaises and even homemade mayonnaise. None of these have rivaled the Italian potato salad of my childhood…until I found myself in a vacation rental in Rehoboth beach with my inlaws and this recipe was born.
