Roman Roll

This is a perfect casual main course to serve friends on a cold winter night. The aromas coming from your kitchen will have your guests anticipating great things and when you sit down to eat they will not be disappointed! Make sure your guests are all good friends – there’s a lot of garlic in this dish!

Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies

These are normal, what you expect to get when you bake them yourself, adult-sized cookies. If a cookie recipe claims to yield 5 dozen cookies and the dough doesn’t fill half of your kitchen, you know they’re lying to you. Unless of course each cookie is paper thin and 1½ inches across! This recipe makes 2 dozen cookies that you’ll be proud to call homemade.

Roasted Pork Chops with Apple Chutney

The pork chops we ate when I was growing up were prepared one of two ways; either fried or baked. When fried they were served with pan gravy and when baked they were always accompanied by applesauce. This recipe is an updated version of the baked pork chops with applesauce I ate as a child. Sweet and tart fruits are the perfect complement to pork. You’ll find fruit stuffed inside and on top of chops, roasts and tenderloins in just about every cook’s repertoire.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Wishing you all a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with family and good food! Bon Appétit!

Maple Glazed Roasted Yams

Sweet potatoes or yams are really good for you. But letting them simmer for an hour or more in a bath of brown sugar syrup is a little contrary to any health benefits! Roasting brings out the natural sweetness and glazing with real maple syrup adds just the right amount of “candy” to the mix.

Pan Roasted Red Skin Potatoes

Sometimes when trying out a new recipe for a main course dish, you devote all of your concentration on the new comer and let the sides, well... slide. That’s not fair to the new dish or your family and certainly doesn’t showcase your kitchen talents. So it’s nice to serve an accompaniment that doesn’t require constant attention, but still looks and tastes great. This is of one the easiest side dishes you can prepare.

Butter Toasted Orzo

The Italian word “Orzo” translates literally as “barley”. It is also the name of a small cut pasta roughly the size and shape of a large grain of rice. Orzo is most often used in soups, and I do occasionally substitute Orzo for barley in some soup recipes but here we’re preparing Orzo as a pasta side dish.