Do you ever get invited to last minute shindigs? Have you heard of Fromage Fort? Do you love cheese? That last question is the most important really, because this is a recipe for cheese lovers. Serious cheese lovers only. Because this is how you use up the odds-and-ends in your cheese collection. You do have a cheese collection, right? A nub of Romano, a hunk of Cheddar, a couple tablespoons of crumbled bleu, some Asiago pieces rattling around in a bag or a drawer or a container in your refrigerator... The French ride to the rescue here, with classic Fromage Fort. Fromage Fort translates as "strong cheese" and believe you me, View Post
Apricot Jalapeño Baked Brie
Raise your hand if you have a party or family event coming up in the next three weeks. Yeah? I'm willing to bet that almost everyone out there has a hand up in the air. Are you supposed to provide a dish to pass? I have the ultimate in ease and WOW factor for you. Apricot Jalapeno Baked Brie is here for the save. Apricot Jalapeño Baked Brie is low-maintenance to make and cannot fail to impress the heck out of everyone who eats it. Spicy, fruity minced jalapeno peppers are stirred into sweet, tangy apricot preserves, spooned onto brie and wrapped in puff pastry before being baked to golden, brown, flaky perfect. The hardest part of the View Post
Eggnog Chai Latte {+eggnog coffee latte recipe} | Make Ahead Mondays
Update: I've received many emails asking where I got the mug. I aim to please, so here ya go! It's part of the MugTails Collection available on Amazon.com Every so often I drink a cup of coffee because somewhere deep down inside I feel like I SHOULD like coffee and it's a lot easier to find a mediocre coffee when you're out than an even passable tea. The thing is... I don't like coffee. I like tea. I love tea, in fact, and that's just the way it is. Like many tea drinkers, I've taken to carrying a few 'emergency' bags of a good portable brand of tea against the chance of finding myself in a place with no tea. It has happened. I View Post
Heath Bar Crunch Chex Mix {Sweet & Salty}
Chex mix is something I only allow myself to make between the day after Thanksgiving and the end of January. I can't handle myself around it and eat myself to the point where I feel like a turtle stuck on its back. A happy turtle, but a little less capable of moving under my own power, nonetheless. My normal Chex Mix is the classic savoury one; butter, salt, garlic, onion, Worcestershire, yaddayaddayadda. That's the one that puts my willpower to the test. However.... HOWEVER... This one comes a close second. This one is dangerous, people. Sweet, salty, crunchy... I find myself with pieces of this in my hand and think, "I don't even View Post
Freeze and Bake Bacon Cheddar Scallion Scones | Make Ahead Mondays
Visit our Bread Recipes page for more wonderful homemade bread recipes! Update: The Pick Giveaway Winner plugin chose Jana as the winner of our Folgers Holiday Exclusive Gift Pack. Congratulations, Jana! Check your email! A couple months ago, I hauled out of bed on a Saturday morning, pulled back my hair and put on my face, put some clothes on that I hoped were cute (who can tell anymore? I'm so out of touch!) and hopped in the car for an hour and a half drive. It was snowing, it was cold, it was a good day to stay home. So why did I go anywhere? Because in a warm building at the Genesee Country Village and Museum an hour and a View Post
Instant Vanilla Chai Mix | Make Ahead Mondays
Tea has a way -unlike coffee- of making time slow down just a bit. This time of year and this season of life, I feel like time needs all the slowing down I can possibly get. I'm trying, with varying degrees of success, to accomplish parenting and homeschooling five boys (two of whom are teenagers), being a good wife, running a home based business, maintaining a free-lance writing career including a newspaper column, participating in my community and its activities, and keeping in touch with family and friends. God bless my friends. They are a patient lot. For some reason or another, my time management skills lately have been more View Post
Salted Caramel Corn | Make Ahead Mondays
Update: The Pick Giveaway Winner plugin chose Christi P. as the winner of the Whirly Pop and Coconut Oil. Look for the email I've sent you, Christi! I can't even wait for you to get to try these things. Congratulations! My Grandma is one of my biggest cooking heroes. She has spent the majority of her life feeding people. My Grandpa, her husband, was a pastor who couldn't walk away from someone who looked hungry, and everyone looked hungry to Grandpa. I've mentioned it before, but it bears repeating that one of my most treasured possessions is my collection of recipe cards handwritten for me by Grandma in my first years of View Post
Peppermint Mocha or Hot Chocolate
Update: The Pick Giveaway Winner plug-in chose Pamela and Miranda as the winners. Congratulations, ladies! Please respond to the email I just send to you with your mailing addresses and details and I will send it onto our friends at Korin.com! I promised a Peppermint Mocha to end all Peppermint Mochas today and I am a girl of my word. I also promised a giveaway, and that's coming up, too, but first a word or two about the ne plus ultra of mochas. This was inspired by my poor friend who went to a place that rhymes with Flickschmonalds and ordered a seasonal Peppermint Mocha because it sounded cozy and warm and Christmasy. She left with View Post
Honey Potato Rolls
Visit our Bread Recipes page for more wonderful homemade bread recipes! Every year right around this time I get sappy. I spend November first through January tenth in a heightened state of emotional lather. We have all five boys’ birthdays interspersed among Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. The ever-racing nature of time is really driven home by singing Happy Birthday twenty five times in six weeks (I figure an average of five rounds of Happy Birthday per child) and throwing in Christmas carols to boot. What this boils down to is that I am the Queen of the Holidays. I’m not suggesting that I’m about View Post
Spanakopita Dip
When is a dip not just a dip? When it’s something transcendental. When it’s born to be a superstar. When it’s… Spanakopita Dip. (And that is NOT anticlimactic. It isn’t. Let me expound.) Spanakopita Dip is the dip that can do it all. A meal-of-a-dip full of spinach, studded with feta cheese, garlic, onions and various herbs and spices it is wonderful at topping chips, crackers and veggie sticks. But it doesn’t stop there. With very little effort, a bit of phyllo dough, and some olive oil, it can be transformed into a beautiful and flavor-packed amuse bouche or finger food. (With just a little more tinkering, it can be made into View Post