Holiday Menu

As much as I adore Thanksgiving Day, I really only do the most basic of dinners. I stick with the boring old traditional meal: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, a vegetable, pumpkin pie.

Christmas, however, is much different. Christmas is cozier, the holiday week is longer. For example, I only have ONE day to prepare for Thanksgiving Day: Thursday. (Wednesdays are very busy with school so I don’t cook that day). So Thursdays are generally not good days for me. But for Christmas, if the day falls on a day other than Thursday, I am set and have loads of time to prepare. I am in the beginnings of formulating a nice Christmas meal. Tell me what you think:

Turkey (we love turkey so I always have it)
Stuffing
Mashed Potatoes

– I know it looks traditional already but the kids and husband demand those three basic foods, lol!

Pumpkin soup?
Stuffed eggs
Cranberry… ? something
Brussel sprouts (my favorite)
Something chocolatey for dessert
…not sure what else, maybe a nice but very different kind of veggie. Got any ideas?

I am already looking forward to it. Maybe that’s because I am hungry right now, lol. It’s going to be a quiet day, a day where we RELAX and cozy up in front of the gas fireplace on hickory furniture and just BE QUIET for a while. Already my heart beats softly in anticipation.

What are your special plans that day?

What’s Your Favorite Recipe Website?

As amazing and vast as the Internet is, I just can’t seem to find *the perfect* cooking website. It’s so different with cookbooks– do you have a favorite cookbook from which you cook ALL the time? I do, I have several. But it’s not so with recipe websites. Maybe because they are usually built around all sorts of contributors who have all sorts of different tastes and ideas. Oddly enough, I like plain food. PLAIN food. No gourmet sauces that take all day to make, no weird ingredients where I have to take a vacation to Paris to find certain foods, no crazy techniques that require a houseful of servants to help. Just plain food.

Is there ANY website out there that offers simple, basic, plain recipes?! For crying out loud! I can’t find one. Maybe every cook out there is trying to outdo every other cook out there. Not me. I just want to slap wholesome, tasty food on the table and get on with life, you know? So many cooking websites think that my life REVOLVES around food. Um, no, it doesn’t. I want to eat because I’m hungry not because I have this sensual, biological urge to indulge my senses in rapturous undulations of culinary ecstasy.

So.

Anyone have any suggestions?

If not, I’m going back to my watermarked, dog-eared, batter-stained Betty Crocker cookbook. I’m rather tired of the same old same old, but sorry, I just can’t muster the energy to whip up the latest, greatest tofu-tainted, kiwi-encapsulated, pine-nutty, asafetida-extracted delicacy for my ravenous teens.

Super Fast Meals for Busy Families

As much as I regale the marvels of fresh, non-processed foods, I do serve them. A little TOO frequently, in my opinion. Oh, we’ve made some advances, but no way do we eat salads and fruit slices all day. Wow, that’s actually a TON of work, time I wish I had, lol! So we do eat “ready made” meals sometimes. Because school has begun and tis’ the season for winter preparation and the onset of the holidays, I thought I’d share a few of my “Quicky Meals,” as I call them. They are great for throwing together in a hurry when you suddendly realize dinner has to be on the table in an hour and you have nothing thawed!!!

1. Pasta with frozen meatballs.

Sometimes I skip the meatballs and throw leftover cubed chicken (when we have it) and pesto sauce. Pesto sauce is SOOO good and a little jar goes a long way.

2. Chicken with shrimp and pasta.

I wrote about this recipe here; I call it Easy Shrimp & Chicken Garlic Pasta. It does require some preparation, but not much!

3. Greek Salad with flat bread.

We love this one. It requires almost no cooking (if you serve shrimp, you have to cook it or thaw the pre-cooked stuff). It does require a lot of table setting (a zillion jars of stuff). I wrote a post about some of our favorite salad ingredients here.

4. Tuna Casserole Sans Peas

I hate peas! So my tuna casserole has nary a one. I love tuna casserole because it can be on the table in about 90 minutes. The hardest thing about it pre-cooking the pasta and trying to shake the gravity-sealed cream of celery soup out of the cans. Here’s our favorite recipe for Easy Non-Peas-y Tuna Casserole.

5. Crockpot Manhattan Clam Chowder

This is a great one if you have 15 minutes to spare in the morning. Pre-cook the sausage or crumble the breakfast bacon leftovers into the crockpot, and throw in a bunch of ingredients. Allow it to simmer all day. By dinnertime, the house will smell delicious. Clean up is SO easy, too. My personal favorite is my own recipe, Manhattan Clam and Fish Chowder.

6. Tortellini with Edamame and Kielbasa

I love this, but the kids have grown out of it. I don’t know WHAT it is about edamame, it makes me feel like superwoman after eating it. It’s just so good. The kielbasa is a little salty and too flabby for me, though. I think the edamame with the tortellini or just the edamame is good enough. I have the recipe here: Tortellini with Edamame and Kielbasa.

7. Leftover Turkey Pasta Primavera

This is an AMAZING dish, perfect for after the holidays when your fridge is stuffed with leftover turkey. I love it because it is so easy and so delicious. Check out my recipe here.

These are the few recipes in my repertoire that I use for those moments of OHMYGOSHIFORGOTTOSTARTDINNER. Which, incidentally, are occurring a LITTLE too often for my tastes. But I’ve been clobbered with writing assignments with such technical topics like Technical Recruiter Consultant Jobs and electric wiring!

Hey, if you have any Quicky Meals that you want to share, please do! I think the family is starting to tire of my repertoire, lol.

Apple Season Commences!

I don’t know, it seems kind of early for apple season. Or maybe September has just kind of caught up to me very quickly…. at any rate, all my local news outlets are reporting that Upstate New York has a bumper crop of apples this year!

What’s really amazing is that the apples survived the crazy weather we’ve had this year. A soaking spring, super hot and super dry summer, tornadoes, TWO hurricanes, and now a blight. :-p Gotta love New York apples! They’re hardy little things!

By the way, if you are like me and can’t remember if Spys are for pies or for fries, or what’s a best eating apple versus the baking apples, see this website: Pick Your Own. They have a huge list of all the apple varieties, when they are in season, what you can use them for, and more. They also have some yummy recipes, places to find PYO apple farms, and loads more information on their site. The varieties list is long, though, beware. Better print it out or load it on your pc tablet for easy access…. I had no idea there were so many apple varieties!

Online Cooking Resources

Boy, I’m glad I decided to sift through my 1,300 emails tonight. They’ve been sitting there since December! They are my “tech” email subscriptions, and I usually browse through them, well, like every three or four months! But I found some really great videos, tips, software programs, and 4-month old news. :-p

Anyway, buried deep with the emails alongside notices about trimedisyn and ANOTHER Apple product release were some links to nifty and free cooking applications!

Cooklet is an online recipe book. I am not completely ready to give up my books, but I do search for recipes online a LOT. My cookbooks are very old, dating back to the 60s, and some of the recipes are fatty and full of carbohydrates. Online recipes are usually more veggie-like. Anyway, Cooklet looks cute. You might like it.

NoTakeOut looks even better. It even has an iPhone app. It’s a meal planning site, but what’s great about it is that it includes side dishes and not just the main course. The recipes there look very good, and the photos are appealing. Click “today’s menu” for the course for today. I like this one!

My friend Carole mentioned a new site she found called E-Mealz. Read about what she thinks of the program so far. I like it enough, except for two things: their meal plans do not accommodate families larger than 4 (or at least, that’s all I could find. If you know different, please tell me!!). And some of the ingredients for things are expensive. Some are gourmet-ish, others are packaged foods. Because I feed a family of 6 adults, we avoid pricey pre-packaged foods and fancy ingredients. So I don’t know that it would be worth my while to get it.

If you know of any other good recipe or meal sites, please let me know. I’m currently expanding my horizons!

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