Delicious Summer Salads

I love salads that are packed with colorful fresh fruit or vegetables, but easy to make ahead and keep in the fridge. They’re handy for events or just when you want to make them to eat for several days. These salads, Tropical Fruit with Honey-Mint Dressing and Black Bean Corn Salad with Cilantro Lime Dressing,…

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Bananana…. Baking with Bananas

Discount bananas have been inspiring me to bake, but there’s only so much banana bread one family will want to eat. So this includes three recipes: banana bread, banana scones, and banana cake.

Apple Cranberry Cobbler

With lots of other projects keeping me busy, I may only be baking on Sunday mornings for a little while. As I’ve mentioned in the last two cake posts, I’m finding Jewish recipes for our cake & coffee time to go along with a series of sermons on the Feasts of Israel. I can get…

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Marbled Chocolate Orange Cake

This was one of those cakes that had me struggling not to lick my fingers as I mixed it up, going back for seconds right after the first slice, then eating every crumb off the platter after everyone else had their portions. I didn’t lick the platter clean, but then I was at church. Obviously…

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Ginger Ale Spice Cake

Our church just started a cultural studies series on the Feasts of Israel and I’m providing festive Jewish food to go along. Until we get into the specific feasts, I’ve been trying different cakes from the Shabbat chapter of Marcy Goldman’s A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking. This was the first recipe I picked out,…

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Feasting 101, Step 2: Event Planning

These questions (along with your goals & limits in Step 1) help figure out the scale of the event and will have a big impact on how much work you have to do. But they’re also where the most creativity comes in, for me, so finding the answers can be really fun. Questions: Do you…

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Feasting 101, Step 1: Goals & Limits

As I said in my “Introduction” post, this should really be the easy part – but I’ll explain why I think you should have answers to all of these questions before you get any further with your feast plans, if you want to make your life easier. Questions: Who are you serving? What is your…

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Feasting 101: Introduction

I enjoy feeding people. Sometimes I like to see how many people I can feed at once and how many dishes I can provide. This is not the sort of thing I expect most people want to do – it gets a little crazy and takes a LOT of work. But even if you don’t…

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Christmas Eve “Around the World”

To make the day pass faster without losing any of the anticipation, our Christmas Eve tradition is to pick a cuisine from around the world and spend a good portion of the day making a feast, which we then eat by candlelight. This year we’re “travelling” to Wales!

Turkey Apple Breakfast Sausage

My family likes to make a big breakfast for holidays or other special occasions where we’re all up late at night talking with friends and want to extend the social experience into the next day. It’s often more of a brunch by the time we all get out of bed and get the meal together,…

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Orange-Vanilla French Toast

I’m fine with basic french toast, but this is a step above – fragrant with orange juice & vanilla, with a creamy batter that balances great with sourdough bread.

Cabbage Kimchi – 배추 김치

Kimchi is absolutely essential to Korean cuisine – it highlights the balance of sour / sweet / spicy / salty that is desired and it’s eaten with almost every meal. Napa Cabbage Kimchi is the most common kind. I’m including a video version of the recipe here for the first time, we’ll see if I have the time to do this for other recipes in the future.