Common Cuisine |

My mommy support group finished up for the school year yesterday. What a fun group that has been to be in! While I love many things about the group, you might guess that my very most favorite part of each session is that it starts out promptly at 9am with a hot buffet breakfast. We all take turns participating in the potluck, but half of the contributions each time are assigned to be Meats. This can include egg and cheese dishes as well, but a large percentage of the meat table each time is devoted to sausage. Yummm!

I believe our location in Texas accounts for the emphasis on this mystery meat. I never thought of Lil’ Smokies and BBQ sauce as a breakfast dish before (to say nothing of the chips and queso), but I sure like it! The best are the link sausage kolaches, in which a fat polish sausage link about 4 inches long is baked inside a pastry. Holy goodness, thank you to Rolf for popularizing this Czech breakfast delicacy in College Station.

There are other things I have really enjoyed about MOPS. See my non-food-related thoughts at my Family Blog.

Yesterday, as we shared an exotic luau themed luncheon, we got all excited to hear about saving money through coupon clipping. My friends and I have decided to try to make it work for us. I’ll blog more about it as we move along!

Meanwhile, see the recipe for our interesting lunch, Hawaiian Haystacks.

How often do you find a new recipe that gets you completely excited about cooking again? Usually for me those recipes are desserts or breakfast dishes. I will admit, I did find new dessert and new breakfast recipes this year.

But a few months ago I found a recipe for carrots, of all things, that just blew me away with how wonderful they taste. I have served these with grilled chicken, roast beef, and chicken fried steak, (another new favorite).

The secret is the rosemary herb mix, I believe. The original recipe, which is probably also wonderful, calls for rosemary. I don’t keep that in stock, but I do have a rosemary herb mix from Pampered Chef that gives it a more complex taste.

Another reason I am so jazzed about this recipe is that it is simple and the kids love it.

I declare Carrot French Fries to be my favorite new recipe of this year, the best of the best in my opinion!

Well I’ll be warding off the vampires tonight, for sure! I have discovered a recipe that makes me look like an artisan bread maker, and it involves roasted garlic. The author of the cookbook (cited in the recipe) has actually served as chef to Queen Elizabeth, which makes me feel even more accomplished in light of how the bread turned out.

This recipe calls for rolling bits of dough into long fingers, spreading roasted garlic puree on top, and tying the fingers into knots reminiscent of soft pretzels. The risen knots are then brushed with an egg wash and baked into rolls with that flaky yet chewy texture that I have never before been able to accomplish. And not only that, tonight is the third time I have repeated the recipe, with stellar results each time.

I have made fire! Click here for the recipe: Garlic Knots.

This year I joined a group called MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers). At our final meeting of the semester, we assembled a craft that was a gift jar of cookie mix. I haven’t tried the Five Layer Bars yet, but have assembled more jars as gifts. The ingredients in the jar are just so pretty, and they are all my favorite things: chocolate chips, butterscotch, coconut and pecans!

For our Christmas party, my table group had a cookie recipe exchange. Here are our recipes from that fun night of yummy holiday treats!

Valerie brought Death by Chocolate.
Wendy brought Peanut Butter Bars.
Brandee brought Peanut Butter Cookies.
Gracie brought Apple Jack Cookies and Pumpkin Chip Cookies.
My contribution was Peppermint Bark.

I could get used to this business of sharing fun recipes! Hope everyone in the group has a fun holiday.

Last weekend’s Thanksgiving feast almost blew our collective minds with how tasty everything was. Actually, as we tried to express how good everything was, we kept trying to find just the right superlatives. We agreed that we should establish a sort of best-of book, since so many of the recipes were the best we had ever had. We jokingly titled this hypothetical publication, Obscenely Good Recipes, due to the responses elicited by the taste testers.

Allow me to elaborate our menu:

• Turkey with Sausage Stuffing
• Mashed Potatoes
• Sweet Potatoes
• Rosemary Roasted Winter Vegetables
• Green Peas and Baby Onions
• Jellied Cranberry Sauce, still shaped like the can
• Pecan Crunch Pie
• Cherry Pie
• Pumpkin Crisp

We had the best ever Pecan Crunch Pie to start off the weekend. It actually got sampled Wednesday night, because we figured it might get overshadowed on Thursday. And that was an excellent decision, although our taste test ended up being half the pie!

The turkey was incredibly moist, even though it had been cooked without a tent. We suspect this was due to the sage butter infusion: Dawn softened some butter, stirred in chopped fresh sage, molded it into a log, and froze it in a sandwich bag for 10 minutes. Then she sliced the butter into dimes and slid the pieces between the skin and the meat. The center cavity of the turkey also was stuffed with some savory items, including a whole onion. Add to this a studious attention to basting the bird, and it came out with so much flavor it made us weak in the knees.

When it came my turn to sample the sausage stuffing, my only response was to pick up the dish and run from the room, shouting €œI’ll see you tomorrow!€ Then I relented and returned it, seeing that there was more than enough to share and I wanted to pair it with the turkey. But it was that good.

Whit made her sweet potatoes with walnut crunch topping for the third year in a row. Same recipe every time, but we all agreed that these turned out the best ever. Perhaps the third time is just automatically charmed.

I tried a new recipe for roasted vegetables. Due to a kitchen time-share scheduling conflict, I ended up actually fire-roasting them outside on the grill. I used carrots, parsnips, turnips, baby tomatoes, whole garlic cloves and fennel. It was both a pungent and flavorful treat! However, my personal opinion of the result was that they should be part of a simpler meal, so they can shine instead of competing with the traditional Thanksgiving spread. Next time I might also use fewer different vegetables, so the ones that are there can speak for themselves. But I can promise you, there will be a next time. Roasted veggies are going to become part of my regular lineup.

Other indulgent dishes were spread out over the weekend. On Friday, we had Next Day Turkey Soup with Dumplings for lunch, followed by Dawn’s famous Artichoke Dip, served with Wheat Thins and crudites, during the game. I love the word crudite (CROO-dih-tee), because it makes cut up veggies sound so exotic!

While we decorated the tree Saturday evening, we snacked on peppermint bark (new family favorite), spiced pecans, and sugar plums. All are simple to make and store well. I also think they are a complimentary trio. Unfortunately the item which goes the fastest, the pecans, are also the most expensive. Maybe a cup of peanuts or mixed nuts served alongside the pecans would make them last longer?

And for Sunday brunch, Dawn made stuffed french toast. Again, this is a simple dish. It is assembled the night before, to allow the eggs to soak into the bread. It can be served with syrup, but it is certainly sweet enough to stand alone. I think the perfect companion for this breakfast would be a bowl full of clementines and a pot of coffee.

Hard to believe, but I think that covers all the exceptional recipes we trotted out over the weekend. Maybe you found something there to inspire you for a future event, even if it is as ordinary as a Saturday morning.

Well the holidays are in full swing! I am really into it this year, because it’s our first Christmas together as a family without having any travel to plan for. I love being home for the holidays, but this year we have a sense that it is our house that is the home, and we are creating the traditions for our kids.

It all started when we put our tree up the middle of November… what, is that so early? We were going out of town for Thanksgiving and I was really geeked to have the decorations up already when we returned from our trip on December 2. As an added surprise, the kids and I came home from the airport to find that my husband had put up icicle lights, our first ever exterior decorations. Woo hoo!

We got right into Advent and Christmas crafts that included ornaments and a kids nativity set. How fun! And then one day, the inevitable urge struck… COOKIES! I thought I would make some cutout cookies. It quickly mushroomed into double batches of nine different kinds of cookies and soon I had boxes and plates of them overrunning my table space in the garage.

Since I have had requests for some of my recipes, I will publish them here. Remember the secret ingredient is… love! You will find recipes for Snickerdoodles, Snowballs, and more.

This week, we are making gingerbread houses and MORE cookies! Sigh… I just love cookies.

I have it! I’ve figured out an easy way to lose weight! All that happened is my lovely husband decided to fast for Lent, and since I’ve stopped cooking for him, I’ve also stopped cooking for myself. And behold! The scale keeps telling me I’m lighter! Of course I’m practically starving all the time, I’m just too lazy to make food for one person. Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t stay single for long after college. I might have wasted away from sheer laziness…