These easy-to-make bars come together quickly and are a favorite grab n’ go snack around here. There’s something about the simple combination of peanut butter, butter, honey and oats, studded with dried cranberries and topped with a drizzle of chocolate and a sprinkling of flaky sea salt that is just so satisfying.
Read MoreIf you can’t have too many muffin recipes, neither can you have too many scone recipes. My favorite will always be the impossibly easy cream scones, but I don’t mind a little change up now and then. These scones are lightly orange-scented and studded with tangy cranberries. Cream scones are soft and tender, whereas these butter-based scones have a richer flavor and are a bit dryer with crisp golden edges. They’re good fresh, but my favorite is to wait a bit longer and then slice, toast, and spread them with butter.
Read MoreOk, so Joy of Cooking just calls these Basic Milk Muffins, but since you can also use cream, or buttermilk, or add any kind of fruit - dried or fresh - or nuts or spices or any variation thereof, I figured I could get away with calling them “endlessly variable”.
These really are just a simple muffin - not heavy and bready, not fluffy and cakey; moist but not dense, and juuuuust sweet enough. They are delicious. Sometimes I make them plain Jane with nothing at all. Sometimes I add a bit of cinnamon and chocolate chips; sometimes I add fruit and/or nuts. In the variation pictured above, I added orange zest, fresh cranberries, white chocolate chips, and walnuts.
I have never made these and not liked them.
Read MoreI love breakfast, but 90% of the time I don’t eat it. On the weekends we’ll cook up a big breakfast...sausage, bacon, potatos, eggs, pancakes, waffles, crepes... But that’s when we have the time to make and enjoy it.
These cookies are a refreshing change from the typical Christmas cookie assortment. They have a great texture - crumbly and studded with oats and chopped almonds, but not at all clumsy or chunky. The not-too-sweet, buttery cookie base is a perfect backdrop to the cranberry white chocolate pairing.
Read MoreWhen the fresh cranberries first hit the shelves I couldn’t resist buying a massive bag at Costco. But besides plans for fresh cranberry-orange relish for the Thanksgiving table, and cranberry orange muffins of course, I didn’t have many more fresh cranberry recipes up my sleeve... and yet there were still pounds of cranberries in the fridge.
Enter this delightful cranberry crunch.
Read MoreWe've made this cranberry-orange relish every year for Thanksgiving for as far back as I can remember. It adds brightness to an otherwise heavy thanksgiving meal. Although a warmed or jellied cranberry sauce often melds better with the other elements on the plate (stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes), there is something so superb about this fresh and zingy relish paired with a slice of turkey breast. So usually I take a bit of both -- the fresh cranberry relish and the cooked cranberry sauce -- and alternate my bites of turkey between the two.
Read MoreThis is a recipe I discovered in a food magazine in high school, and I've been making it every fall ever since. The cake batter is so easy to mix up (no mixing aid required). It uses one full can of pumpkin puree (no leftovers to deal with). The pumpkin flavor is not overpowering, adding a subtle earthiness and a delicious moistness to the cake. The cranberries add a bit of zing, and the Brown Butter Frosting takes this treat to the next level.
Read MoreBiscotti is just an excuse to have cookies for breakfast, and I am 100% okay with that. This recipe for biscotti has no pretenses to anything other than a sweet, crunchy bite. Heck! It even has chocolate drizzled on top. But they are also loaded with almonds and cranberries, which makes them both satisfying and nutritious. They are just tender enough to be eaten on their own without breaking any teeth, but they hold up extremely well--and perhaps are improved--when dipped in coffee, which brings them into the breakfast realm, which, like I said, is fine by me.
Read More