Posts Tagged ‘easy’

I’m an especially lucky mom these days. One of my guys adores baking, and if I text him a recipe that has a drool-worthy picture, chances are pretty good he’ll whip up a batch within a day or two.

Such was the case with these decadent peanut butter cookies. They’re rich little treasures, filled with peanut butter cream and mini chocolate chips. I found them in a Food52 post on Friday, and when I got home from a very cool car show with my auto enthusiast son on Sunday, there was a plate of these—beautifully made—on the kitchen counter. Bless his heart!

Generous guy that he is, he made the cookies about three times larger than called…

Category: Recipes

Oooey-gooey s’mores. They conjure happy memories of warm summer nights under the stars: toasting a marshmallow to golden perfection, carefully sliding it onto a crisp graham cracker, topping it with a square of chocolate and another cracker, and watching all the melty lusciousness ooze out the sides of the sandwich. Comfort food doesn’t get much better than that!

While I can’t promise that these baked s’mores bars will transport you right to that same happy place, they do have the potential to make even the grumpiest monsters smile. The top and bottom crust (the “graham cracker”) is soft like a blondie. The chocolate is literally some chocolate bars placed on top of the crust. And the marshmallow…

Category: Recipes

Sure, chocolate’s the expected choice for a Valentine’s Day dessert, but c’mon, doesn’t this sweet and glossy raspberry dream look festive and romantic too?

A traditional English dessert, Eton Mess is commonly made with strawberries, layered with meringue and whipped cream, and it’s named for the college in the UK where it was created back in the 1800s. This variation, adapted from the Barefoot Contessa, features plump, glorious raspberries. The sweet meringue pieces contrast the tangy berries and add a delightful crispy crunch, and it all swirls together on your spoon with the help of fresh whipped cream.

To top it off, Eton Mess is a cinch to make. The raspberry sauce takes but a few minutes on…

Category: Recipes

Is there any better Super Bowl comfort food than chicken wings? Crispy skin. Spicy, tangy sauce that drips down your chin and tempts you to lick your fingers. Chased by refreshing gulps of frosty, crisp beer.

Chicken wings, of course, are perfectly suited for an endless variety of sauces. Buffalo sauce, barbeque sauce, sticky-sweet teriyaki sauce. All good, and all in our rotating chicken wing repertoire. But we came across a recipe that blows away all other chicken wings. The star of the show is Thai hot sauce, also known as sriracha, and the supporting flavors include the warm — almost exotic — nuances of cinnamon, coriander and cumin. Fresh cilantro cools the sauce, while lime juice…

Category: Recipes

Ribollita — Italian for “reboiled” — is a hearty Tuscan vegetable and bread soup with peasant origins.  Its name comes from the practical reheating of yesterday’s minestrone soup, throwing in whatever leftover vegetables and stale bread you had lying around, and reboiling the whole concoction. I’m happy just to start from scratch and wind up with the same lovely, warm, comforting soup, since leftovers are so rare with four teenage boys eating us out of house and home!

If I had to pick my favorite cuisine, it would be rustic Italian or French. Nothing fancy, just simple, traditional, slow-cooked, handcrafted dishes that you know are made with a whole lotta love. Ribollita is a perfect example…

Category: Recipes

Looking for a comforting, hearty, winter dish that you can pull together pretty quickly? Look no further! This simple one-pot wonder can be enjoyed as either a delicious soup or a belly-warming stew, depending on how long you reduce the broth. And leftovers—if there end up being any—are a most welcome sight and reheat easily over a low flame.

The recipe comes from a favorite old cookbook called American Brasserie by Chicago chefs Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand. With my lifelong penchant for collecting cookbooks, my library has long since outgrown a shelf in my kitchen, and I have to be selective about which books make it to the shelf of honor and which live a…

Category: Recipes

Life is nothing short of hectic these days with four teenagers, all on different afternoon and evening schedules. There’s baseball training, newspaper layout sessions, driver’s ed classes, sports broadcasts, Spanish tutoring, yearbook meetings, study sessions, alumni college interviews, guitar lessons, piano lessons, bass lessons—well, you get the idea. Some nights, it’s like Grand Central Station with ridiculously staggered arrivals and departures.

On those crazy nights, instead of wasting time cooking something that will be shoveled down on the fly between activities, I often put together the components for BLTs (or in this case, California BLTs!) and let the troops assemble themselves as time allows. They’re easy and satisfying, and the cool secret is cooking the…

Category: Recipes

The moment summer starts, my boys begin clamoring for their very favorite summer dish: this crunchy, flaky, fresh fish in a luxurious, tangy butter sauce. I have a hard time holding them off til late July, when the stripers are ubiquitous and tomatoes are good and ripe. But once I treat them to it, they wish they could have it every night.

Making the dish is easy, although I typically have to triple the recipe to feed my hulking teens. Grrrrr. The good thing is that striped bass is fairly firm, so it doesn’t fall apart in the pan like more delicate fish, plus it cooks relatively quickly. The key is to keep pieces of similar thickness…

Category: Recipes

Yup, again with the tomatoes. Can’t help myself—they’re so sweet and ripe and juicy that they enhance every summer meal. It’s quite a love affair I’m having this year.

This time, they’re the star of a cool and tasty pico de gallo, or fresh salsa, that can be enjoyed many ways. You can scoop it up with tortilla chips as a refreshing appetizer with a nice, cold cerveza. You can heap it atop a hot-off-the-grill steak for a bright, tangy counterpoint. You can spoon it over a perfectly poached egg for a flavorful, healthy breakfast.

We used it as part of the delectable grilled fish tacos we made over the weekend. The sweet crunchiness of the…

Category: Recipes

My experience with this gazpacho was like going on an exquisitely swoonful first date—where the guy is Jon Hamm-handsome; you trade exceedingly witty, wise and charming discourse; and you wake up the next morning walking on clouds and daydreaming with a silly grin on your face—and then following it up with an even more enchanting second date just days later. Oh yes. It’s that sublime.

I spotted the recipe while flipping through Fine Cooking, and was instantly intrigued that the author was inspired by a handwritten recipe from her Spanish mother-in-law, who hailed from Sevilla, the birthplace of gazpacho. Like she urges, you must wait until the tomatoes are ripe and juicy, or the resulting soup will…

Category: Recipes