This was a simple dump cake with 4 cups of blueberries. I used frozen ones. The cake mix was lemon and no nuts were used, so I did not find this version as interesting. The apple blueberry version has more fruit and also nuts and was superior to this one. However, it was very popular at a potluck.

A can of apple pie filling and 4 cups of blueberries. I used the frozen ones I am trying to use up. Other than that a typical dump cake with 1/2 cup of pecans. It was a nice quick crumble and great for breakfast.

This was another well received pot luck dessert. I used a 20 ounce can of crushed pineapple instead of the 15 oz can called for and just did not use all of the juice. I used organic shredded and not sweetened coconut and was surprised that worked out well. The top was beautifully browned, it added a bit of crunch to the top and the pan was completely emptied. A nice variation on this type of dessert.

We liked the rub that was used for cooking the chicken wings, it is worth trying without the sauce. The ssauce was improved by heating the cherry jam to dissolve lumps and cutting up the larger cherries in it. We also like that the sauce was applied after cooking.

The dry rub is excellent. We frequently make this recipe with chicken thighs. I make large batches of the rub. For the two tablespoons of chili powder I make one teaspoon of it smoked paprika. The chicken is best fresh right out of the air fryer, so I prefer to not make enough for leftovers unless you want cooked chicken for a recipe.

I have not been able to cook any recipes with soy sauce (bad reaction to soy) until a colleague showed me this recipe. It turned out dark and real salty with some umami flavor and so seems like a great substitute. The next time I will try and find bouillon without MSG and substitute apple vinegar for balsamic to get rid of the sulfites.

A mostly whole wheat sweet breakfast bread with buttermilk, walnuts, raisins and dates, and no oil or fat. It came together rather quidkly, cooked the exacted amount of time specified and looked just like the picture in the book! It was remarkably moist and delicious and what just what I was in the mood for. It made two loaves and I have the leftovers presliced and wrapped for breakfast on the go!

This is a very good plain monkey bread. I prefer mine with nuts and sometimes raisins. But if you just want a sticky, not overly sweet breakfast treat, this is a great recipe. I do like that they tell you how many pieces to cut it into at the start. I remembered to only partially dip each ball into the melted butter. It is easy to spread it with your fingers to cover the rest of the ball; otherwise I have run out of melted butter before. I also try to keep one hand for the butter and the other for the sugar. I also did not let mine rise as high as they recommended and it turned out perfectly.

I make two dozen cupcakes which will yield 16 booties for a baby shower. I cheat by using canned frosting which I color pink or blue and after the crumb coat, cover the booties with little stars with a decorators tip. (So I skip the coconut.) This time I made chocolate cupcakes and covered them with chocolate frosting, making brown booties. Since it was a double shower for the father of a baby boy and the mother of a baby girl, I put little blue stars and blue shoes laces on half of the booties and pink on the other half. It was a real conversation starter, and as we had guys there too, they were not shy about eating them up.

Flakey and cheesy scones with beautiful dark green aromatic flecks of dill throughout. I found it a little confusing to my taste buds that were expecting onion or garlic flavor. The recipes worked perfectly except my scones never come out as wide or tall as the directions state, so this time I went with the ¾ tall and slightly narrower than 4” squares (that are cut into triangles). These turned out very well, but I don’t see myself making them again.

Big bold pieces of carrot were different than the usual matchstick cut and were easier to prepare. I hate boiled carrots, but love the concentrated flavor of these roasted carrots. They tasted sweet and almost like lemon juice had been added. This recipe needed to cook an extra 15 minutes for the largest carrot pieces, and I needed to remove the smaller pieces at intervals to prevent over cooking.

Fresh orange flavored yogurt with nice bursts of texture and more flavor from the added ingredients. I am not a big fan of grated citrus peel, but added just enough to really make the orange flavor predominant. I skipped the sieving step by starting with fat-free Greek yogurt. Adding honey, walnuts and citrus were natural accompaniments. I thought about roasting the walnuts, but they tasted great unroasted. Chunks of orange on top added to the lightness of this dish.

Very flavorful and colorful and more complex than the usual cous cous recipe. The onions, parsley and curry gave it a bold flavor, and the grated carrot, currents, and dark greens of the parsley and scallion gave it a great visual appeal. I liked that this recipe did not call for chicken stock and enjoyed it as a vegetarian dish by itself. Although it also goes well with chicken.

The dough came together reluctantly acting like pie dough without enough water. After chilling, it rolled out just fine. I would not have gotten 24 if I had followed the directions to roll them ½ inch thick and use a 3” heart cutter. My thickness was too variable ¼ to ½ inch and I used a 2” heart cutter. I dusted them with the smaller crystal size of natural cane sugar and they looked very nice and tasted like classic shortbread. This was a good classic recipe and next time I will roll them all 1/2 inch, but also cut out 1" hearts as well so that my son can more easily bear to part with them to share with his college friends.

I was looking for a way to reduce the butter and instead decided to follow the Smitten Kitchen suggestions to halve the recipe and bake it in a 9 X13” pan. I also took her advice to line the pan with parchment. I only used 1 of the original 3 eggs and still had a very buttery dough that was difficult to spread, it helped to put a little moisture under the parchment. I cut the finished cookies into smallish squares. The pecans were perfectly crunchy with nice caramel. I did not care for the butter soaked crust and oily tops of the cookies. The caramel still managed to get under some of the parchment and some seeped under the crust, this was not a bad thing as it seemed to help hold the crust together. The parchment made it manageable to remove the entire cooled bar to a large wooden cutting board for ease of cutting. I was glad I did not cool the cookies in the refrigerator as suggested, as they were firm enough and cut just fine at room temperature. A mostly delicious cookie, but it should be possible to reduce the amount of butter.

I used mango (4 large) and the local blueberries I have frozen (4 cups) as she suggests changing the fruit. I added ½ of the juice of a lemon as both fruits did not taste as all tart, the full 3 TLBS of flour with the fruit, used the brown, but not the white sugar with the fruit, and only made half of the topping. It turned out beautifully in my large round casserole dish. I should have thawed the blue berries for a more bubbly interior, but the mango did not disintegrate and that was nice too. I prefer the old Betty Crocker crisp recipe with rolled oats and chopped nuts, this was more like a sugar topping.

This recipe made up very similarly to the shortbread hearts. I toasted the pecans before dicing as instructed. She suggested using a square cutter. I used a wide plastic ruler and my cleaver to cut very square cookies with no waste. I loved the wonderful almond smell coming from the almond extract in the dough and cookies. However the roasted pecans provided their own aroma and although I loved the crunch of the pecans, the two flavors fought each other. In the future, it would be fun to try walnut flavor (I can never find a use for it!) with toasted walnuts, or almonds with almond extract. With pecans, I think sticking with vanilla extract would be best (the recipe calls for both).

I followed bhnyc’s advice to cook the garlic slowly and also to serve the broccoli warm or room temperature instead of cold. I placed a large sieve colander in the big pot to boil the broccoli in and then it was easy to remove the colander with broccoli to the sink to cool it just enough with running water. The cooked garlic cloves on top made all the difference and it was a nice departure from my usual micro waved plain broccoli. The family seemed even more appreciative.

A beautiful tasty dish and we also had it with Steelhead trout. I think it would stand alone and be great with some sugar snap peapods as well. I followed Quezzle Sister’s advice to add more veges – an orange pepper, and break the spaghetti in half. Loretta had commented that the sauce made the noodles mushy and so I froze the ginger, thinking that the enzymes in the ginger were the culprit and I did not notice any mushiness to the noodles, but kept the leftover sauce separate, just in case. The sauce started thin, but thickened as it stood. I used spaghetti rigati, and the square ridges held the sauce nicely. This had a more complex sauce and with more colorful vegetables than a peanut butter based dish I had made in the past.

You really can just walk away and come back in 1 ½ hours to a perfectly roasted chicken. But I did cover it with foil after an hour, so the dark meat would not dry out too much. I did not want the gravy, and saved most of the chicken for later. It was great to have on hand to throw together a quick meal. It was nice and simple, but had good flavor.

I used half the butter and substituted buttermilk for the heavy cream, but kept the sour cream. I wished I had added the melted butter first, then added the warmed buttermilk (as in the America Test Kitchen recipe). That way I could have controlled the amount of liquid better. 1 ½ cups turned out way too watery. Don’t use fat-free butter milk, it separates when heating. I liked the suggestion for evaporated milk. This was not a success for me.

I also used one large squash which equaled half the recipe. I followed the directions to the letter using a glass 9 X 13” pan. The directions worked perfectly. I couldn’t “see” the brown sugar, but it sure worked to bring out the sweet flavor of the squash. I would not change a thing about this recipe.

This is my favorite chili recipe. The red comes from small red beans, canned tomatoes, tomato sauce and canned pimentos. It is different from the standard fare with pinto beans, meat and some tomatoes. The pimentos give it more vegetable in a subtle way. I like that it takes dried beans and that they are not soaked overnight. It is also delicious with pinto beans, but takes longer to cook. I feel there is not enough liquid in the recipe to cook the beans properly, so I add 2.5 cups of water. I do not like a lot of heat so I really cut down on the spices.

This recipe sounds amazing with lean beef stew meat, prosciutto, a fennel bulb and other regular beef stew ingredients, but it was too salty! Omit the salt called for, and check the salt content of your canned tomatoes and kidney beans. To make it edible I boiled potatoes and added them and it helped. Maybe I should have followed their directions and served it over hot pasta.

Beef Stilfado
P 57 *****
This is a very different rich type of stew with totally different spices. The recipe worked just fine. The only vegetable is onion and so the suggestion is to serve it with rice or noodles and greens. What really makes it spectacular however are the toppings of chopped walnuts and feta cheese.

Sometimes I am just in the mood for hominy, am this fills the bill. This is a very hearty stew with pork, chicken, and various chilies. It seems like too much meat to me, and I usually omit the chicken. I also reduce the chili powder and have always omitted the ancho chilies, but am becoming more adventurous and will include them next time. Serve with hot biscuits or cornbread.

Even though it used chicken broth, not coconut milk, this was still excellent. It is very convenient to make as everything is in one pot including the rice. Snow peas are thrown in at the end with pre-cooked shrimp after everything else has cooked. This is another recipe with a short cooking time (4 hours). The spices are intense and the fresh lime juice along with coconut, raisins, peppers and onions give a lot of flavor surprises as well as good variety in textures.

I love this recipe with a finish of orange peel, brandy, mini marshmallows and chopped pecans. Roast the pecans first and you will like this even better. I like cooking the yams this way for thanksgiving as they are fancy for company and it gives you more room in the oven or microwave for something else.

This is a really excellent use of cheap country pork ribs with hoisin sauce, soy sherry, ginger: the usual Chinese spices, but also a nice sweetness from honey, a lot of garlic and grated orange rind for freshness. I am always a fan of cooked scallions and this has a whole bunch along with the crunch of water chestnuts. Great with rice and a green vegetable.

This flavorful stew is made with lean pork and is good with either the squash or with a substitution of sweet potato. It is somewhat sweet with raisins and brown sugar, but depending on which red wine you use, it balances the flavor and is savory with the addition of the Worcestershire sauce. Very nice for a cool fall day.

This was a nice one pot meal with the rice thrown right in. I cut back on the curry powder, but added extra apple (large apples) and mango chutney (to finish the bottle). You have to brown the ground beef and onion, but other than that, easy to put together. This is one of their recipes that fits well in a regular (3 ½ quart) slow cooker. Their suggestion of a cucumber yogurt salad on the side is a good one.

This was a nice vinaigrette, although a little too heavy on the oil for me. I see that she has two versions of this recipe and this is the one without yogurt. I made it just as the recipe specified with pre-ground cumin. I was expecting more punch from the cumin. I think it would be great with freshly toasted cumin seed ground up in a mortar and pestle.

This was my first introduction to a clafoutis and the recipe sure made it sound like a boring desert. This was also my first cooking with the stash of vanilla beans bought for a previous challenge. This was outstanding and continued to call to me from the recesses of the refrigerator. I liked it better than the pear and cherry versions which I tried after this one. The vanilla really stood out in this clafoutis version. I used pink lady apples which do not brown immediately so I skipped the step of soaking the cut apples in lemon and water with no ill effects. This is a great, but simple dessert which holds well.

This was an incredible salad. My pears are either too hard or too soft, but these pears were at the perfect stage of ripeness. I was afraid that the pears would brown, but they held up well. The richness of the nuts, sweetness of the pear, creamy contrast of the gaot cheese, tartness of the dressing and roar of the arugula was amazing. This would be a nice special salad for company.

This was very good and I am always looking for an excuse to eat Arugula. The strong flavors of the feta, vinaigrette and the arugula went very well together. I used small tomatoes, which formed small wedges when cut. Even so, I would prefer the tomatoes more in smaller bite-sized chunks rather than the specified wedges.

I was looking for a sugar cookie recipe that was rolled into balls, then into sugar, instead of a rolled cut-out cookie. This worked OK, but we should have rolled the complete cookie into sugar, instead of just the top. We used a huge assortment of sugars including plain sugar mixed with cinnamon. It was a great activity for kids of all ages to roll lumps of dough into balls and dip into sugar and sprinkles. The favorite ones were rolled into a mixture of same color sugar and nonpareils. I thought the dough could have used additional sugar, but these were a complete crowd pleaser.

Economical and restrained brownies, but still very delicious. These are made in an 11 X 7" pan (so smaller than my usual 9 X 13" pan). The first layer is an oatmeal, flour, brown sugar and butter crust. The second layer is walnut brownie, and the third layer is fudge frosting. I was shocked that the whole recipe only took 2 squares of unsweetened chocolate (no cocoa) and only 5/8 of a cup of butter. My favorite brownie recipe takes 8 squares of unsweetened chocolate. My son loved them (second only to marshmallow brownies).

So delicious, they are dangerous. This recipe in the book is a little odd as it is Just two paragraphs at the bottom of a page without a separate list of ingredients. I was inspired to try it as these were one of my mother's favorite cookies. These are dense, full of flavor and the walnuts in addition to the raisins add great bursts of flavor.

If you like Elephant Ears, you will love this mini- elephant ear version. I have been baking a version of this recipe for 24 years. I don’t make it very often, but it is great for a special occasion. This time I made a double batch for a bake sale. It is such buttery dough, that I kept the formed roll in the refrigerator at all times, except for the part I was rolling out. Instead of using half dark brown sugar and half white for the filling and for rolling, I substituted an equal amount of light brown sugar. I always have trouble with running out of the sugar cinnamon mixture for rolling out the crisps and with a double batch, it emphasized that for me. So I tried using just enough so that the dough did stick a little as apposed to seeing how much sugar I could make stick – the results were very different. With as much sugar as possible, they could be rolled out thinner, were very crispy, covered with a delightful layer of melted sugar but the cinnamon swirl going through the center could not really be visualized. Also, it was imperative to use parchment to keep them from burning, repeated scrubbing your pan, etc. I found I really liked the less sugary version, they were thicker, but you could actually taste the flakey pastry and it still did taste sweet enough.

We wanted to cook something using a large bag of huge potatoes and a nice block of Cabot Cheddar and this recipe from a promotional cookbook from Cabot Creamery seemed to fill the bill. We microwaved the potatoes instead of baking them. The directions were a little sketchy. It said to combine the sour cream butter, grated cheddar and onion flakes, but did not indicate that heating was involved, so we didn’t, but then we were unable to pour the mixture over the potatoes. However, it still worked out well. Unfortunately my onion flakes had gone bad, so we used chives from the garden, and could not resist crumbling bacon on top. The flavor of the Cabot cheddar came through and was memorable. It worked well as a main course.

I like this recipe because it uses superfine sugar which goes into solution easier than regular or natural sugar used in other recipes. This recipe also has a great ratio of ingredients. If you have spent any time in Brazil and particularly if you came back with a bottle of Cachaca, I highly recommend this recipe.

We used a double recipe of this marinade on a charcoal-grilled butterflied leg of lamb (for that grilling technique see The New Basics Cookbook – Butterflied Leg of Lamb P 469). It has all the flavors I want when cooking lamb – garlic, fresh rosemary, also fresh thyme and olive oil. This turned out to be the best tasting leg of lamb we ever had. The flavor really penetrates much more than all of those times I spent forever sticking slivers of garlic into a leg of lamb. I wanted to review this recipe before I forgot (again) where it came from because that would be tragic.

OK, so it took me 6 ½ hours of near constant activity to produce one pan of totally amazing pecan rolls. The first time I made this recipe using the cookbook for that year of the TV show, I went out and bought the pan specified, a tall sided non-stick 9X13” metal pan. Making these for a bake sale was not one of my better ideas as you will want to keep and eat them yourself after all of that work. In addition to making the dough, filling and caramel glaze for the pan, you also make the pecan topping separately. Unfortunately I let them over bake a little and then went to sleep after turning them out of the pan and so they did not get covered on a timely basis, and so were a little dry. But these were still quite spectacular with all of that sticky caramel and crunchy pecans on top and they brought a very good price individually at the bake sale. Well worth the effort if you hanker for an amazing pecan roll experience.

This brined smoky turkey was just right. We had a bird on the smaller end of the range (12 – 14 lbs) and it barely fit in our Weber grill. We skipped using the V-rack as it would have interfered with the lid. The amount of coals was perfect. On the last “leg” of cooking it took the longer period of time. I like that cooking the turkey this way frees up the oven for all the other cooking. This is about the third time we have done it and having the temperatures in the 70s helped. We have had trouble keeping the charcoal going when the weather has not cooperated (cold and windy).

I was curious to see how this recipe compared to that of the Barefoot Contessa. There were major differences with the addition of oats, powdered sugar and cornstarch. The directions and pictures were very clear. Baking the shortbread in the collar of my 9.25” spring form pan opened on a rimmed baking sheet did not work for me as the fit was so tight it did not open any. When the short bread baked it wrinkled and flaked off in places as it had no where to expand. It might be a little trickier, but next time I would place the bottomless spring form on my largest un-rimmed baking sheet. I substituted rolled barley for the oats (food sensitivity). I had a hard time getting them ground into flour, ending up with lots of hard bits even when I sieved it. It was my own fault as I used a small food processor instead of the specified coffee grinder or blender. However, it is hard not to like real butter short bread. I love the shape of it, it tasted great and I will definitely make this recipe again.

Oh the bitterness of all those rich walnuts! This recipe has an additional cup of ground walnuts in addition to the 1 cup of finely chopped nuts. Now I know what I spent hours peeling those walnuts for in The Pie and Pastry Bible recipes. To a New England palate, I do not think the bitterness may be as overwhelming (having grown up there myself). The son I made the cookies for loved them. One positive factor is that you will not eat too many at one time. They also wait until the cookie is cool to dust with powdered sugar. One of my favorite parts of the Russian Teacakes was the repeated rolling while warm in powdered sugar so that it made its own icing. I will go back to my Betty Crocker recipe for Russian Tea Cakes.

I like that the blueberries are added last and that you can use frozen blueberries without turning the entire dough blue-grey. This was a very interesting way to work the butter by grating frozen sticks halfway, leaving the handles to be put away for another use. I am not always a fan of citrus peel, but I liked the addition of the grated lemon peel here. I cut the long rectangle into 3 perfect 4” squares instead of 4 - 3”squares so I ended up with 6 very large scones. This dough was too soft for me and it would have turned out OK if I had used my scone pan. My next mistake was to remember that I had not brushed the tops with butter and sprinkled on the extra sugar after they had been in the oven for 1-2 minutes. I thought it would be all right to pull the pan out and do this, but apparently the dough had already warmed up so that the final product looked awful, spread out and leaking butter. But they still disappeared in a hurry and there was a little fighting over the leftovers in the freezer. I will look forward to making this recipe again and doing it right – there are still a lot of blueberries in the freezer.

I had extra cream on hand and these were the easiest scones that I have made in a long time. I was happy to have the currents on hand that the recipe required; they gave just the right amount of sweetness to the scones. This was a very wet dough and once again I was saved by the scone pan forming 8 perfect scones. This is a perfect recipe to whip up in a hurry if you have cream and currents on hand.

We were looking for a garlicky pasta recipe to use with precooked Langostinos and adapted this recipe. It makes a perfectly seasoned sauce with a total of only 5 tablespoons of fat/oil. We barely heated the langostinos at the end. I caught myself throwing away the
langostino juice, tasted it and the flavor was phenomenal so I substituted what I had been able to save for clam juice. The flavor is also from vermouth, the garlic and lemon juice. We will definitely do this again the right way with raw shrimp.

The best part of this recipe was that the spiciness of the cookie meant that I was satisfied with only one! The ginger flavor was nice and strong, I used unsulfured molasses, so that flavor did not overwhelm, and the ground black pepper added to the spicy note. I found it easier to shape the cookies by dropping the dough directly into the container of sugar from 2 spoons without first rolling it around on my hands as it was a very wet dough. A third spoon was used to make the transfer to the cookie sheet. You were admonished not to overbake and so I underbaked them as directed, but thought that they tasted too raw in the middle. It could be the humid Florida factor. This is a flavorful, pretty cookie and I will bake it again.