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Every Christmas, Aunt Jean sends my mom a big box of homemade jams, jellies and preserves, so my plan was to put off making a batch of Buttery Jam Cookies, one of this month’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipes, until the box came in. I love finding out what flavor combinations Jean’s come up with from year to year, like orange-champagne, tangerine, strawberry-kiwi, pear. And they’re so good, I’ve even eaten the blueberry-lime, even though blueberries make me feel like I’ve swallowed a chainsaw. That’s how much I love Jean’s jams.
So, I waited for the box. And waited. And Mom never mentioned it.
But on Christmas morning, when we all sat down to breakfast, there were the jams, jewel-like, next to a pile of homemade biscuits.
A few weeks ago, Jeff read me a list of things people had searched for here. Pound cake. Pot pie. Corn casserole. Chocolate pudding cake.
I hadn’t posted a chocolate pudding cake! Well, that made chocolate pudding cake Unfinished Business, which I am compelled to Finish before the New Year. Just wait until you see how long I stay up trying to clear out my Inbox. I forget to blink.
This is my all-time favorite Hot Fudge Pudding Cake. The one I make when it snows or when my PMS (aka the Raging Pink Hulk) makes me crave an intense chocolate punch in the face. Read More…
I was all set to publish this post about Prince’s Hot Chicken, when I found out that a relatively new magazine about the South – called, God help us, “Garden & Gun”
John T. Edge writes, “I fear the apocalyptic burn of the skillet-cooked and cayenne-swabbed chicken dished by Andre Prince Jeffries the way I fear the wrath of the Lord. So should you. One taste of a Prince’s drumstick rouses me from a twelve-pack stupor.”
Amen, Brother.
I was going to tell you about Prince’s, because a.) we’re starting a tradition of going to Prince’s for a post-Christmas cleansing, and b.) one of my New Year’s resolutions is to graduate to the “medium.”
Are you as dog-dead tired as I am?
We’ve been wassailing and making merry for two weeks and seven parties so far, and I’m ready to park my jingle bells on the couch. I’m ready to watch a marathon of “House” or “Law and Order.” I’m ready to go to bed without having to pick the glitter off my face.
And I’m so ready for another bowl of Ina Garten’s Pappa Al Pomidoro, one of this month’s Barefoot Bloggers picks. Warm, thick and full of flavor, this Tuscan bread-and-tomato soup is just the thing to sneak a few vitamins and minerals into a body that’s grown strangely accustomed to copious amounts of cheese straws and coconut cake. Read More…
The clementines are finally in!
I was so excited to see them that I picked up my little wooden box from the grocery, slid it into the fridge and completely forgot about them–what with all the cookies, layer cakes and cheese balls roaming around–until today, when I remembered I had five pounds of clementines that needed to be eaten ASAP. Five sweet, easy to peel, practically seedless pounds of orangey potential.
The perfect opportunity to try a Clementine Granita.
Yes, I know it’s cold outside, snowy even, but hang with me. All this dessert requires is clementine juice, sugar, maybe a little rum, and four to six hours in the freezer. Every few hours, you rake a fork through the mixture. That’s it. But this simple dessert is so light, so cold and so packed with magical clementine flavor … It could shake up a brunch, soothe a sore throat or be the perfect non-gut-busting ending to a heavy winter meal.
There’s nothing like having four pounds of Loaded Triple Chocolate Bark in the house.
Got a potluck party? Take the bark.
Need a last-minute gift? Give the bark.
Too busy to make lunch while you’re carving a birthday cake shaped like a gently-used toilet? There’s always bark!
This bark began as a batch of spiced pecans coated in brown sugar, cayenne, nutmeg and cinnamon and then toasted. Yes, Virginia, they could stand alone, but that’s not the Holiday Way. While the pecans cool, keep yourself from picking at them by melting three different kinds of chocolate: semisweet, milk and white. Pour each type of chocolate on a big sheet of parchment, sprinkle the mixture with chopped pecans and coconut, spread it with a spatula, and let it set for a few hours, until you can easily break it into medium-sized pieces and shove them directly into your mouth.
This bark is ridiculously rich, so don’t share it with recent heart patients, small animals or toothless children.
I can’t wrap.
Either I’m an inch short on paper, or the ends won’t fold up to make that nice little triangle. My gift bags look like they were stuffed by Mrs. Kelley’s third-grade class. And every year, no matter how much paper I buy, I wind up with one gift that has to be wrapped in a garbage bag. (Note to self: Invent festive, peppermint-scented garbage bags.)
But I love the process. Jeff and I drag all the wrapping supplies into living room, turn on a movie (Christmas or otherwise), make some snacks and start the extravaganza. My new favorite wrapping snack is Mom’s Caramel Corn with Nuts. It’s also my favorite movie snack. My favorite post-breakfast snack. And one of my favorite party foods. You can make enough for every man, woman and child in the Target parking lot without breaking the bank, and it’s so sweet-and-salty, yummy, crunchy good.
It’s also dead simple. Fill a huge aluminum roasting pan with freshly popped popcorn and nuts. Make the caramel. Pour it over the popcorn and nuts. Then bake it for an hour, stirring every 15 minutes. The popcorn will keep in an airtight container for about a week, so it would make a great gift. Just don’t ask me how to wrap it.
When I was a kid, years before the naked Nativity, our local Harvey’s Department Store had a Talking Christmas Tree. A huge fake cardboard tree with rolling eyes and a moving mouth that would “talk” to customers as they passed. The bane of my existence. Every year, when Mom did her Christmas shopping at Harvey’s, I ran past The Tree and hid in the only place where The Tree’s all-seeing eyes couldn’t find me: Ladies’ Lingerie.
Finally, Mom got sick of looking for me cowering in the endless racks of bras and panties and told me to go talk to The Tree. I’m sure she thought I’d just walk up, like all the other kids, and tell it what I wanted for Christmas. But then that googly gaze swirled around and locked right on me: “HU-HU-HU-HEY, LITTLE GIRL! DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL MESSAGE FOR SANTA?”
Something inside me snapped. Read More…
There’s an ice storm coming. Remember that episode of “Little House on the Prairie” where Pa ties a rope from the house to the barn so he can tend the livestock during a blinding blizzard?
This isn’t going to be anything like that.
A Middle Tennessee ice storm usually means some broken tree limbs, maybe a short a power outage and an insane rush to the grocery for “essentials.” People will wait in the grocery line for 15 minutes to buy a frozen pot pie, eight rolls of toilet paper, a bag of Oreos and some Jiffy Pop.
My favorite meal for a night like this is Baked Ziti with Italian Sausage. Gooey cheese. Spicy browned sausage. Really, I could stop right there, but I love to experiment with different mix-ins (i.e. peppers, onions, mushrooms), cheeses, herbs and pasta sauces, especially ones that include red wine.
Oh, how I crave this stuff. There should be a 12-step program.
P.S. I’m going to kick myself for saying this, but the sausage isn’t essential. If you’re a vegetarian or just trying to eat healthier, feel free to leave it out. There, I said it. Now, I’ve got to go scrub off the shame.