I hope you get lots of candy, especially large Reeses Pieces Peanut Butter cups. They’re the best. Unless you like apples or nuts or other healthy stuff. Then I hope you get lots of those.
Stay tuned for a big announcement tomorrow!
September 27, 2011
Thanksgiving in September
I promised I would share a surprise. Well, here are all the details. But first, we have to back up a couple weekends:
“Let’s go to the Cape for Thanksgiving this year,” I told David at dinner that Saturday.
“Why?” David knows that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday right up there with Christmas.
“So we can get away, do something different.”
I told him my reasons: we aren’t going to get vacation time together until spring, we’ve been wanting to get away for a weekend anyway this fall. Then I paused, thought, and said,
“And my sister won’t be here to celebrate, which means whatever dinner we have will just not feel right.”
David realized that this last comment was perhaps the most important reason: I just didn’t feel like celebrating Thanksgiving if I couldn’t do it the way we’d done it for the past five years.
“Why don’t we celebrate early this year when she comes for the conference next week?” he suggested.
It was brilliant. Suddenly, I was excited about Thanksgiving again. So we made a menu, planned, prepped, baked, moved furniture, and worked all weekend for her arrival Sunday evening.
And we had a delicious, festive dinner. We ate so much food, and drank delicious apple martinis. We had a great time, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t November.
I tried something new for dessert: I call them Apple Pielets. I hope you enjoy!
Apple Pielets
4-5 medium-sized apples
1 Tbsp butter, cut into small pieces
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
Pie crust
Preheat the oven to 350F. Peel and dice apples, test to be sure you have enough by gently mounding them into four ramekins. Add more apples if needed. Pour apples into a medium-sized bowl and mix in butter, sugars, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Stir until juices form, then gently mound back into ramekins.
Roll out pie crust and cut 4 circles the size of the ramekins (I used a large water glass). Place one pie crust circle on each ramekin and carefully slice for holes into the top. Sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar if you want.
Bake at 350F for half an hour, or until tops begin to brown. As the pielets cool, they will deflate – just enough to put a dollop of vanilla ice cream on top!
December 21, 2008
It’s official: Winter is here!
The above picture was actually taken Friday, before today’s storm. It’s been an incredibly snowy weekend, and it’s a verifiable winter wonderland out there! Fitting for the first weekend of Winter. I just hope this isn’t how the whole winter will go, otherwise I’ll have to spend it all at home, drinking tea, and curled up under woollen blankets. Wait, that wouldn’t be so bad would it?
So the bad news is that you haven’t seen a lot of original pictures from me, because my poor little Cannon Powershot digital camera has gone on the fritz. I don’t know why. I haven’t dropped it or abused it. Perhaps the few months of neglect while I wasn’t posting was enough to make it go on strike? I have to take it in to the photo shop to see if there is anything that can be done for it. In the meantime, the pictures you see here are from my boyfriend’s camera, when I can convince him to let me use it!
Christmas is a-coming, and if I don’t see you all before then, please have a Merry (and safe) Christmas!
December 18, 2008
Fifth Annual Menu for Hope
Tis the season! One of the wonderful parts of being in the food blogging community is the charity that people express. Not only are food bloggers willing to help each other out, but the kindness goes way beyond the virtual world and right into the lives of those who are the most needy.
Each year for the last five years, Pim of Chez Pim has organized the Menu for Hope charity event that benefits the UN World Food Program’s work in Lesotho. Here’s how it works:
Bloggers donate incredible raffle prizes and post descriptions of them on their blogs, which are organized by regional hosts. The public can then look at all the beautiful prizes and buy raffle tickets through Firstgiving. Each ticket costs $10, and they can be applied to prizes by designating their code in the comments section when donating.
This is an amazing event, and although I’ve never won anything, I find it an exciting charity to be involved with. Last year over 90,000USD were donated to the Lesotho project, including a school lunch program as well as the local procurement program. To learn more about the WFP’s involvement in Lesotho, please click here. And make sure you see the Lesotho children’s breathtaking pictures here.
After the jump I’ve put in what I consider to be the highlights of the prizes, but you should definitely check out the master list yourself.
And don’t forget to enter in to the raffles at Firstgiving.com!
December 5, 2008
Happy Saint Nicholas Day!
It’s crazy how late Thanksgiving was this year. Just a week ago I was frantically cooking our dinner (we had ours on Friday), and today I’m celebrating one of my family’s fun Christmas traditions!
Before I go into Christmas already though, I have to give Thanksgiving (tied as my favorite holiday of the year), a proper mention. The menu turned out very tasty. I highly recommend the roasted sweet potatoes, which came out super sweet – without added sugar – through its special baking method (it started in a cold oven!). I also recommend the other Cook’s Illustrated recipe we used, which was for green bean casserole from scratch. Yum, without the processed food guilt! The apple onion cheddar gratin from Moosewood’s New Classics, as always, was delicious. If you can get your hands on those recipes, they are definitely worth it. Gourmet’s chorizo cornbread stuffing left some to be desired. I’m not really a big fan of cranberry sauce or brussels sprouts to begin with, but others really liked them.
So, St. Nick’s.